Shots fired!
It has so much promise but the 'lead by committee' approach just resulted in some kind of collective 'demand avoidance' from the devs who seem to revel in delivering an unusable product. And I mean unusable for those not willing to learn an entirely new paradigm of interacting with a piece of photographic software and dive into the docs for everything, including stuff as silly as a keyboard shortcut or move between modules.
I've yet to read all the Ansel blurb but I'm pretty sure this is from the guy who's made the most improvements to Darktable in recent releases. So it's incredibly exciting to see.
I doubt it'll get any DAM capability though, even for a fork that is asking too much :-)
The whole "if you don't like how a program works, you can fork it and change it" thing.
Amazing to see this actually working in practice. You might not like Ansel, but he does, and more power to his elbow!
But then I care about the results, a nice picture to print or look at on a screen, way way more than about the tools used to get that result. Goes for cameras and lenses and whatnot as well.