Killer feature is intuitive UX. Using DarkTable was an exercise in frustration for me.

In darkroom mode you can’t navigate to other photos with cursor keys. Since the cursor keys do nothing else I have no idea why the aren’t bound to the nav. You have to double click on a photo to select it, one click does nothing so again I have no idea why not just bind single click to select. Then it recenters the entire row on what you selected, which I find disorientating but I suppose because you can’t navigate with cursor keys this recentering is necessary.

If you are willing to read the manuals and relearn everything it can do what it’s supposed to but the UX of LR is worth it to me.

> The way they do it, unfortunately, is by maintaining every previous version of the processing pipeline.

A LOT of professional software does this. It’s one of the biggest moats they have to customers switching.

I’d pay to see what software like Parasolid does to manage fourty years of backwards compatibility (CAD models made 30+ years ago have to come out exactly the same).

Foss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a path. And if you are not using it on timescales that would allow for incremental upgrades you are not the ICP anyway so they've made a good engineering decision.

>How do the FOSS alternatives handle this?

In the same way, because there's no other way. Darktable in particular contains previous versions of the color pipeline. Every RAW software does that.