Pull pictures off camera manually into a date-named folder
Open lightroom, click "new catalog"
Put catalog into named date folder
Import those photos (import without move option)
Work on those photos, use the slider catalog thing at the bottom to filter by flagged (the ones I edited and like), then ctrl+a and export.
Phase One's Capture One solves this by using "sessions" instead, which lets you keep any sort of workspace as a loose individual folder; with preset subfolders for raw files, output, trash, previews, etc. You still get the benefits of tagging and other bells and whistles of searchable libraries but with much easier grouping and portability.
While this really doesn't apply to casual editing, I think the performance benefits and flexibility of the session approach over LR's insistence on libraries cannot be overstated if your RAW files start to number in the thousands after a few months (event/wedding photographers, etc.).
It would help if you specify what you mean by library management. What it doesn't do, and is very clear, is handle things like renaming files. You are expected to have copied the files over to your hard drive and organized them into folders (in any way that you like).
Beyond that, it serves library management well enough. You import a folder, and it becomes a collection. You can tag it, do queries, etc. It works very well for me when I want to find all photos of, say, my cat - even though they are spread across many directories.
Why would you have to spend months to figure that out
Right. And then as I'm working on a project, and decide that collection needs to be two sub-collections, these three shots should actually be in this other project, these two shots maybe should be part of both this project and that project, these three portraits might fit the mood of that collection I'started putting together a few months ago... what do I do then? I'm fine with having to pick a folder to store my files in, that's a simple data storage problem. Library management is about semantic data, and in case you haven't noticed every file browser is absolutely garbage at that. Tags, especially the tiny little PITA tag browser box that was so clearly an afterthought in darktable, are an inadequate solution.
(I spent months trying to figure out what I was missing because I heard darktable repeatedly pitched as an equivalent to Lightroom, such as in the comment I replied to here, so I figured an answer to these fundamental workflows needs must be hidden in there somewhere and I was just committing the cardinal sin of Not Reading The Docs. When I finally did pore through the docs and find nothing more than tagging is when I jumped on the mail lists and discovered the devs are actually not interested in building an Lightroom equivalent.)
