When I tried darktable as a complete begginer I was completely lost and ended up learning rawtherapee instead. Would you say it changed now?

Darktable seems more popular than rawtherapee, but is there a big difference feature-wise?

I think the “etc” shows how f***ed up it might be to package for every single distro. Releasing a tar with no extra bloat and letting each community doing its own things over it is probably one of the best approaches?