I still use the final version of the perpetually licensed Lightroom, and so far haven't found anything to replace it. Sometimes I use it in a Windows VM on Fre

I still use the final version of the perpetually licensed Lightroom, and so far haven't found anything to replace it. Sometimes I use it in a Windows VM on FreeBSD sometimes I use it on a Mac. It largely just works, even with a catalog that I desperately need to pare down. Meanwhile Darktable is a pathological mess. I really want to like it. They even offer a Mac binary on their download page. Unfortunately, it turns out that the only first class platform is Linux. None of the core devs actually use a Mac so bug reports languish and users are told to simply compile DT and fix the bugs themselves. I'm working up to compiling DT, but the instructions are all built around MacPorts which I ran away from years ago. Yes, I'm aware that DT is an open source project maintained by volunteers but sometimes I want higher level packages to just work without a fight. If I want to import metadata from Lightroom I'm expected to export individual sidecar files and hack up a script to do the import (hint: this doesn't scale). The real deal breaker for me was that the latest version available on the DT site simply crashes for me while trying to import photos. But not every photo. I'm not particularly inclined to file a bug report because most Mac issues get put in the circular file. Once I got past that I found the interface to be… interesting. Despite the superficial similarities to Lightroom, DT is wildly different in practice and not all that intuitive to me (e.g. applying presets from the lighttable vs darkroom modules — also seriously those names: darktable, lighttable, darkroom are all far too similar regardless of whether or not they're based on photography terms). It's been a few years since I've tried RawTherapee but obviously that didn't stick either.