[brudgers]

I am also a hobbyist and I use Darktable. I've experimented with RawTherapee. I like RawTherapee's editing controls and love that its sidecar files are somewhat human readable (Darktable's are not).

What Rawtherapee lacks is the 'light table' feature for handling bulk photographs. I'll often shoot several hundred images in a day (even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes). Darktable lets me triage those photos and filter them for processing without managing a file system... well now that my workflow uses RapidPhotoDownloader on the front end. It reads off the memory card and renames files and directories to a standard format.

A few months ago, I brought many years worth of sorted directories of images into Darktable and went to bed and when I woke up it had added everything to the database and I could sort by name and remove duplicates and look at thumbnails and remove junk that had been saved alongside stuff I wanted during bulk operations.

Anyway, since Darktable runs on Mac, there's not a drop dead reason not to give it a spin alongside whatever you're currently using.