a Vim editor for image processing, truly usable only from (broken) keyboard
shortcuts known only by the hardcore geeks that made them
to make the general UI nicer to people who don't have a master's in computer
science and more efficient to use for people actually interested in photography.
OTOH with the way that the devs condescend to its users darktable looks doomed to be a basket case. Seriously. Try clicking on or scrolling over whitespace and watch as you send random widgets off into a tizzy.
In the equivalent of the develop panel, on the left you have a "history" box with a list of operation. For every picture you open its comes pre-populated with entries that sorted in reverse order (operation 0 comes last). Why is that ? That's because it's not a "history of action that the user has done" like in almost every software in existence, but a "history of the operation done to the image". They should really rename this to "operations pipeline" or something similar.
I took me a long time understand this and by the time I get it I already moved on to CaptureOne.
Then around Blender 2.8 they finally re-designed the entire UI, and ever since then it's been steadily gaining adoption among 3D artists.
The technical issues though. Ugh.
You nailed it.
Every time I tried it as a daily driver I found Linux is great for people that want to screw around with config files and the command line and not just use the computer.