My fascination with Darktable (I used to use it actively) ended after I tried creating a selective mask, an ellipse, to darken the moon on a picture. While the mask was positioned perfectly when zoomed in 400%, it would jump up or down on different zoom levels, and would end up somewhere else when exported (Aurelien Pierre, the OP, mentions screen vs raw coordinates in his post, I guess I’ve seen the manifestation of that).

At that point I decided, enough is enough. Darktable is painfully slow, it takes over 1s to see the result of very basic brightness adjustments, the interface is laggy (OP mentions that as well, a simple mouse hover issues over a dozen of SQL requests)…

So for now I’m paying for Lightroom mobile. It is lightning fast, has AI masks, comes with 100GiB of cloud storage and works on any decent tablet or phone. I enjoyed Darktable’s instruments, and I like how my images ended up looking. But when even very basic features do not work, the advanced ones become less relevant.

I tried Ansel, and unfortunately, although, it fixes some of the issues, it doesn’t fix all of them (and some are absolute productivity killers). And at that point I wonder, why didn’t OP fork some earlier version, like 3.6, without that MIDI revolution and all the regressions. Later in his post, the OP mentions, that dtvk is the future. So why don’t invest the effort there instead? I’m no stranger to donating to open-source projects, but I don’t feel like investing any time or money into something, that has no future (even the OP admits that).