Kinda a hard statement. You say Darktable produces bad results out of the box , while the filmic defaults where for me a reason to take note and start using Darktable.
So, don’t confuse fact and opinion here.
I’m amazed with all the questions about ‘getting in camera look’ , while i often just need to set exposure , hit auto in filmic and look if i want to tweak saturation/colorfulness in some way to be ‘done’. Posts where people ask ‘how to get this look’ for me seem to always answer with ‘load, set exposure , set colorfulness and done’ ??.
Now, to be honest , for me it isn’t really the V5 / V6 change . It’s the change to maxrgb that trips out most people . It now really tries to preserve color even in very bright parts. And this is just a case of 'sometimes you want this , sometimes you don’t '. It’s awesome with skies and portraits , it’s maybe not what you want if you want specular highlights to show contrast and turn to white.
Yes, i do have some pictures where I like the V5 defaults more compared to V6 defaults… But they are few , and when noticing it afterwards I can almost get something out of V6 that i likeas well (most often changing preserve chroma mode , and / or playing with the latitude slider ) .
I didn’t read it properly, but ‘in my mind’ V6 is now even better than V5 in preventing hue shifts and staying true to the resulted color . This changes how highlights look , which can trip people up . The tool is made by the author to fix certain issues and to be a technically correct tool, that you need to master to get a desired output . It never is and will be a one click solution.
V6 is technically more correct , so it’s the new default. That you (and others , and maby most) like other results with fewer clicks … Setting up a default more suited to your liking is easy enough.
(But like priort i never noticed filmic has special auto settings , i always hit the auto button to get a start point after my exposure and tone equalizer has done its thing )