Will do! Thank you 
now I’m excited. Tinkering with new techniques hahaha
darktable is designed to give you control other tools doesn’t give you. If you don’t need that control, then it‘s pretty fine to head over to a more simple and ‚Intuitive‘ (usually just a paraphrase of „what I’m used to“) tool…
The developers are aware that not everybody needs that amount of control, but there are plenty of tools in the market that are simpler and might satisfy such needs. There’s no need to add another me too tool …
You’ve come to pretty much the same conclusion as everyone who hasn’t spent enough time with darktable to know how to get what they want. Learning a new program is difficult, especially if it supposedly does the same thing as other programs but does it differently.
That’s because that’s pretty much what it is. darktable tries to leave the user pretty close to the math and give you fine grained access to turn your image.
If by “user friendly” you mean “simple” then no, darktable is not simple and it doesn’t try to be. But darktable is easy, that is, when you need something more complicated, it doesn’t take that much more effort to learn how to get there.
When you slide too far towards “simple” you get lightroom’s clarity slider. Its on slider and under the hood its doing a bunch of things. If you like part of what its doing, like local contrast, but don’t want the sharpening part of it, too bad. On the other hand, darktable has at least three different modules that have a bunch of sliders that give you control of each little part of what clarity does.
Yes that’s common. You need to understand that you don’t need to figure out every single slider of every module before you start doing some basic editing. In fact, in darktable’s current iteration, I use fewer modules than I ever had (I just use multiple instances of those modules). Really the bulk of my edits are Tone Equalizer, Color Balance RGB, Filmic. Now Color Equalizer. That’s about it.
Sure but then we loose the power that everyone enjoys.
If you need speed and can’t take the time to learn, honestly darktable probably isn’t for you. There are plenty of editors that make things fast and simple. You can eventually match editing speed and maybe be faster, but you probably won’t get there quickly.
Correct.
If you do have concrete, actionable ideas on how to improve things, then you should open a detailed feature request on github. However, this is a lot more difficult than most people assume, and while you may not understand the operational paradigms and the UI isn’t 100% consistent, things do work a certain way and you need to fit within that.
These things need to be pretty detailed, and vague statements like “I hope someone will come along and make it better”, “I feel like this could be easier”, or “this could be more intuitive” are generally not welcome, as we’ve heard them over and over again and they all mean something completely different depending on who is saying it.
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Not quite 
You didn’t take away everything but orange and red and I feel it’s a little too dark in the foreground. But then again, there’s no right or wrong here. It’s a matter of taste and how close one can get to the reference image. I think the most valuable lesson of this exercise (for me) - apart from understanding better what the modules in DT do - is, to be able to analyze an image to understand, what is going on and then replicate that process. 
Photography to me is an exercise for the eyes. I want to learn not only to see a good photograph before even looking through my viewfinder but also see the photo with the edit already in mind while shooting.
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Perhaps some Ansel Adams books on pre-visualization are in your future.
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You can find some similar looks here as well…
Fresh Lut’s
Just take note of what colorspace/gamma they are meant for as DT without some manipulation doesn’t work with some of the cinematic and log profiles or maybe I should say the look wont be as expected…
Maybe like this one…but I haven’t had time to try it or any others yet…
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@priort Ohhhh interesting! I’ll check it out Thank you!
@paperdigits No Amazon here in Guatemala hahaha
How can I use a .cube file in DT? I tried some from the page you mentioned but DT doesn’t seem to open them…
I think they should work and they can also be converted if need be. You do have to specify in the preferences what folder you will keep them in and then move them there. I think you need to restart DT after you select the home directory for the luts…
I did all that. But it still doesn’t work.
Docs are here: darktable 4.6 user manual - LUT 3D
@paperdigits Believe me - I didn’t post here before consulting the manual. 
That’s what it says:
This module accepts .cube, .3dl, .png (haldclut) and .gmz files. Uncompressed 3D LUT data is not saved in the database or the XMP file, but is instead saved to the 3D LUT file path inside the 3D LUT root folder. It is therefore important to back up your 3D LUT folder properly – sharing an image with its XMP is pointless if the recipient doesn’t also have the same 3D LUT file in their own 3D LUT folder.
I have a cube file. Doesn’t accept it. So unless there is something wrong with the files from the link above, I don’t see what else it could be…all other luts in the folder which I have specified in DT, are working fine.
Try a different cube file, I guess.
I tried 3 
none of them work.
I think maybe and I say maybe you need GMIC dependency??
What’s that?
It says for gmz luts so maybe its not needed. I do have it installed in WIndows and dont have any issues with CUBE files but maybe there is another dependency missing for CUBE files on your install… I honestly cant recall… I’m sure someone will know…
I’ll try to convert the cube file into a PNG and try again.