I don't hate it. I'm just not compatible with it I guess. It's like GIMP in its early days - has most of the features of competition (Lightroom vs Darktable, Photoshop vs GIMP), even more features, and tweaks, and more knobs. But it misses USER EXPERIENCE part, it's basically unusable, unless you use it since early days.

If Darktable had a grant/GSOC just to improve UX, it could be a valid competitor to Lightroom. Currently, it's not. It's bunch of Python/Lua scientific code with some UI, that processes pictures.