I’m growing more and more impressed with its capabilities the more I use it! Wrapping my head around its approach to masking, and its “scene referred pipeline” took some time, but now that I’m getting the hang of it, I think I can say I genuinely prefer it to Lightroom.
Combined with digiKam, which is excellent for photo collection management, I’m a very happy photographer :)
In terms of noise reduction which greatly affects image quality it is nowhere near the big commercial players.
Have you tried the “Denoise (profiled)” feature? It applies auto de-noising per your camera model and metadata quite nicely. You can then fine tune it after enabling the feature.
I’ve found the profiled noise reduction in Darkroom to do what I need. I’ve not noticed any significant difference between it and the results I was getting from Lightroom.
That may be so, but Lightroom is not the class leader in noise reduction. There are other programs out there that do a much better job