Personally, I’m grateful this tool exists. I have used Adobe Lightroom 5 the one you could get on a disc, like, when owning things was actually possible. Adobe has systematically pissed me off over the last decade. Lightroom was great, non-destructive edits, import into year with sub directory sorted by months. Quick copy and apply edits. Lr5 was great.
I’m just a hobbyist photographer, I’m not doing pro level anything or charging anyone anything. I would love to use the student edition. I refuse to though, because it requires Adobe to upload them online, use them for ai training, it’s not private. I take photos on a camera to NOT have them on the Internet. To be honest I’d be upset if a photographer used any ai or cloud storage for my personal photos. Sadly, it’s so baked in a photographer might not even know. Not everyone cares or is tech savvy(which is totally fine) it’s not their fault the company is shady.

That was a first issue, second they won’t support the version I have any longer, ok that’s how software/hardware works, but it’s a subscription model now and that sucks. I upload 6 months of photos at a clip, I didn’t need a monthly sub. Because of that I’m tied to an old laptop that’s on death’s door to edit my pics.

Darktable provides everything I need that Lightroom did, sans a small bit of import magic to organize photos, and it’s a little tricky to use but after about an hour, I understand how to get things going. Anything has a learning curve. With darktable I know my pics are mine, they are on my laptop, I won’t be paying a subscription. That small amount of frustration is worth it to tell Adobe to piss off.