RAW processing

Same here.

Perhaps it's time for me to dispel some myths then Darktable was once pretty much a raw processing engine but that was way, way back. I think it aims to be a complete DAM product in its own right and all image information is stored in a high speed SQL database with image tagging and sorting and flexible queries. There are some users (not me) managing huge image collections with it.

That all said if your need is primarily cataloguing and batch throughput rather than extracting the absolute maximum from select images there probably are better suited alternatives for you ( or at least this isn't how I use darktable so I can't recommend it there from my own experience). Darktable progress in this area is fast however and some of the devs seem to be working to provide quite extreme capabilities for customising workflow, as far as I can see essentially exposing processing and storage internals to a scripting language rather than just the usual user actions and macros although most of us won't want to go that far I suspect.

Exciting times for dt as well other programs at the moment.

Rgds,
Rob.