I don’t really share this experience to be honest, granted I copy my files to my pc manually anyways (I didn’t even know that your method was possible), but darktable has a feature pretty similar to that. “Copy & Import”, I don’t think it pops up automatically when you insert a card, but you can change the folder and the naming and such as you like. You can even ignore non-raw files, an option which I haven’t found in lightroom. So I’m not sure what’s so bizarre about the import tools in darktable, seems pretty similar to lightroom to me.

Customization is great but when it just needlessly adds steps to the equation and disrupts what should be a butter smooth workflow, I jump ship. There’s so many things on LR I’ve been able to intuitively figure out while their Darktable equivalent require viewing tutorial after tutorial.

That I kinda do agree with, some things in darktable are definitely more complicated than they should be, I don’t really want to watch a 40 minute tutorial on how to recover shadows from an image and there are also sliders and buttons which seemingly shouldn’t be used. So yeah darktable is less intuitive in that respect, although it works great ones you know what to do (And tbh it’s not that difficult, most tutorials are just excessively long)