Threads like this are a little pointless since personal preference plays such a huge role in our opinions, but for what it’s worth I played with Obsidian for a few months (and bought an annual sync subscription to really commit to my test), but mostly had the same experience as OP. It’s easy to spend a lot of time tinkering with Obsidian and “optimising” it in a way that feels productive but is probably either unnecessary, or ultimately forcing Obsidian to do something it wasn’t originally designed to do.
I wasn’t looking to replace DT, I just got attracted by other folks’ experience of using both apps together. Ultimately I stopped my experiment and am migrating my Obsidian notes back into DT (actually I haven’t yet but only because I’ve been procrastinating). There were several points of friction for me (a huge one being that I want my notes next to their original texts), but I had spent a lot of time changing settings and installing plugins with Obsidian, in a way I didn’t have to do with DT.
I do very strongly feel that too much customisation/choice is a bad thing (in life generally and in apps 
). I appreciate the “railings” that are imposed on us by DT (and many other apps that are not as customisable as Obsidian), and find the cleaner “this is how this app does it” attitude conducive to work, personally.
I do also think the onboarding experience is different, mostly because of this customisation issue. With DT, there’s a manual and a couple of books, a forum, and usually one answer to the question “How do I do X?”. With Obsidian, I didn’t find the onboarding so easy: there’s a million YouTube videos, and often multiple answers to “How do I do X?”, which then drags the user into quandaries they shouldn’t have to worry about. (Honestly if you don’t know how to do X, you should just do what the app tells you to do… the problem is Obisidian often isn’t telling you, it’s presenting various plugins and you’re left to figure it out on your own without the expertise you need to make a decision… you’re a newbie after all.)
Re: cloud storage, since it’s been discussed here, I specifically chose DT because it was local app (and Obsidian!). I don’t want hundreds of my personal files in a cloud service somewhere. My work files are not so interesting, but like many DT users I also store all my life paperwork in a database. I want that to stay local.
I do also feel it’s a bit pointless paying for all this storage and processing power on our devices and then sticking everything in the cloud, but I did that for years.