Oh boy, DA, where to start...

Apparently, it's the only art gallery I know of where you're not allowed to put umlauts in your titles. Why ever, I have no idea. There was one other site I was on that had this problem, but that was due to an encoding issue, and not simply being prevented from having a title with umlauts at all. I think it's been fixed by now. And other people have been complaining about this issue since 2009, and it still hasn't been addressed.

They handled the beta testing of the new submit page rather poorly and made regular members beta test it. I was unable to submit anything for a long time because my Internet connection was too slow for it. Like, what's the point of having a glorified beta tester position if you're not going to use it?

I'm not a premium member, and the premium features have never really interested me enough to buy a subscription, and I know what beta testing entails, and don't want that role on DA. But still, I get to put up with this: http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/180/4/d/profile_picture_by_angelus_tenebrae-d55eezi.jpg

Because apparently, everyone who doesn't have a premium membership wants one.

Most of the artwork on DA is unimpressive. Of course there are some good artwork you can find with the help of some elite groups and so on, but in general, the search is horrible, so don't be surprised if you end up with mediocre Sonic fanart or Disney stuff when searching for more classical subjects. As a thought experiment, I changed the settings on DA to show the latest works rather than the best ones, and the great majority of artwork that shows up are cheap copies/traces of official artwork from various cartoons, manga/anime or video games, poorly taken mobile phone selfies (sometimes nude) with bad lighting and poor contrast/sharpness, ugly, half-assed sketches that would go better under scraps, or other works that look to me like no care or effort was put into them. It may just be me, because I'm a hard person to impress, but I have better luck on sites like HF, Pixiv and even Tumblr.

DA is one of the worst places to get critique from. Almost no one leaves you constructive critique; they just like to leave one liner comments. The premium critique feature is stupid and redundant. There are critique groups, but they're either poorly managed, don't have enough people offering the critique, or done on an exchange basis, which is almost never a good enough incentive for good critique. There is only one place on DA that is even remotely worth getting constructive critique from, and it's a chat group, but probably won't offer critique for NSFW stuff, being that it's DA's rules. 

The only reason I'm still there is primarily for advertising. I have had a few people ask me if I would let them use some of my Gauss pictures for their groups, or the mathematicians picture for some math related event. I once got an interview from a Brazillian Nintendo fan site because I was on DA. And I do have a few friends who only know me through DA. But I guess that's not really surprising; DA feels more to me like a social network than an art community.