Also, an aside. I would love an image editor that would let you build your own chain of editing modules in an arbitrary order. Like audio plugins, with the ability to have more than one instance of each one.
This is especially true for professional workflows. I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I shoot anywhere between 15 to 20 weddings/year + a plethora of other sessions (family, portraits, etc.).
The asset management (and plugin ecosystem) are nearly just as important as the RAW processing tools itself. Lightroom (Classic) is even wired up to my gallery delivery service (Pixieset) + ImagenAI for first pass edits.
I've tried and used Darktable in the past. It's already completely capable of being my RAW processor, but it's everything else that's missing that makes my end to end professional workflow possible. The processing/editing tools was never the problem that keeps people locked into Lightroom. It's the decades of plugin development & the asset management features.
But when I switched to Darktable, I didn't really miss it.
I have a simple organization: Year/description/YYYY-MM-DD/*
(So 2026/yellowstone/2026-06-01/*).
In the end, what matters are the files I export to JPG. It makes sense to use a separate photo organization tool to manage those.
For me it was always just folder based. For example YYYY-MM-DD - Eventname and then have sub folders like raw or export.