Most users don't care about the features DT has over LR, that's the point. If DT truly was the superior alternative, it would skyrocket in popularity like other open source software done right, like VLC.
I don't know why downloading is your killer feature for a RAW development app. But when ls scrolls too long I use more and when I need to download thousands of images a week to my NAS and working drive, I use Rapid Image Downloader. You can configure it to kick off automatically when you insert a drive. If that's your major use case maybe you don't need LT or DR.
DR does what it does better than anything else. It's not as good as other apps at what they do. That's okay?
That's not really a fair comparison. VLC development started in 1996. Darktable was first released in 2009. Give Darktable another 13 years of development and then you can make that comparison.
... You just said it would be a fair comparison if we gave Darktable 13 years, and now that I've basically given you that comparison by simply going back 13 years and comparing VLC then with Darktable now, you're moving the goalposts and saying "actually you can't compare the two at all because they're different software". So... which is it?
No one's disputing that the UI of a video player is simpler than photo editing software-- the point though is that among video players, VLC is king because it's so user friendly. Devs work around user requests/feedback, while Darktable's approach is "the users can work around how we think the program should work".
Again, I just find it interesting that you started off by saying one can compare VLC with Darktable, but only if we give Darktable 13 years to have the same amount of development time as VLC-- but when we basically achieve that by comparing VLC's user friendliness 13 years ago to Darktable's user friendliness today, suddenly it's not a fair comparison anymore because... new reasons.
You're misunderstanding what I was saying. You gave the example of VLC being a superior open source video player, compared to other video players. I pointed out that VLC has been in development for a lot longer, so has had a lot of time to become as loved as it is. It wasn't embraced in the earlier years of its existence the same way it is today.
Once Darktable has been in development for longer, then it can be compared the same way, not to VLC, but to other photo management software.