Well yes, you can do professional photo work in either, but darktable is not as easy to use. Masking in darktable for example, is incredibly configurable and powerful, but it’s also quite technical, and nothing at all like the AI driven object detection masking that Lightroom uses.

The ability to overlay masks to add or subtract from each other on a per module basis isn’t something that Lightroom does, so working out how to make the most of it in darktable is a process.

The scene referred pipeline workflow changes the way many of the modules work compared to similar functionality in Lightroom, and scene referred worklows in general is not the way most photo editing and management software works, so it’s a whole process to learn as well.

I’m finding darktable better and more powerful than Lightroom, but it is absolutely harder to use, and takes time and patience to understand.