Nice to see another darktable user! I also learnt so much about photo processing thanks to their tutorials. It's very technical stuff that went ober my head mostly but it was fun to read.
Sadly it's the case for a lot of open source softwares I feel. I've had the same feed back on GIMP.
But honestly once you get used to it, it has some really great tools that actually make it just as powerful (if not more depending on who you ask) than its direct competitor: Adobe Lightroom.
It's a little rough to get into it, but imo it's worth the investment.
For sure. Darktable is very powerful. I don't understand why FOSS struggles with UX/UI so much. We know what works and what doesn't. Can we have a baseline that's at least somewhat usable? Blender does a great job, but I don't know if that counts as FOSS