I have still been unable to get my copy of Lightroom 6.5.1 to launch on an M1 Mac, via these instructions or any variant I've tried. I was able to get it working fine on a 64 bit x86 Mac running 12.6, though, so it's an architecture issue, not an OS version issue.

 Crashed Thread:        0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

 Exception Type:        EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
 Exception Codes:       KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x00007ff81e8fc7b9
 Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000002, 0x00007ff81e8fc7b9

 Termination Reason:    Namespace SIGNAL, Code 10 Bus error: 10
 Terminating Process:   exc handler [48076]

 Thread 0 Crashed::  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
 0   libConfigurer.dylib           	       0x10b9550a7 0x10b901000 + 344231
 1   libobjc.A.dylib               	       0x7ff80089a537 load_images + 1315
 2   dyld                          	       0x2031a7672 dyld4::RuntimeState::notifyObjCInit(dyld4::Loader const*) + 170
 3   dyld                          	       0x2031b1745 dyld4::Loader::runInitializersBottomUp(dyld4::RuntimeState&, dyld3::Array<dyld4::Loader const*>&) const + 167
 4   dyld                          	       0x2031b1733 dyld4::Loader::runInitializersBottomUp(dyld4::RuntimeState&, dyld3::Array<dyld4::Loader const*>&) const + 149
 5   dyld                          	       0x2031b1733 dyld4::Loader::runInitializersBottomUp(dyld4::RuntimeState&, dyld3::Array<dyld4::Loader const*>&) const + 149
 6   dyld                          	       0x2031b182c dyld4::Loader::runInitializersBottomUpPlusUpwardLinks(dyld4::RuntimeState&) const + 164
 7   dyld                          	       0x2031d1117 dyld4::APIs::runAllInitializersForMain() + 337
 8   dyld                          	       0x20319c369 dyld4::prepare(dyld4::APIs&, dyld3::MachOAnalyzer const*) + 3743
 9   dyld                          	       0x20319b281 start + 2289

My primary requirements are:

• Keep my photos in the folders where I placed them, rather than sucking them into a database and renaming everything. This eliminates Apple Photos as an option.
• Don't modify the original files except to write tags and other metadata into them.
• Do not store things in The Clown.
• Understand the EXIF tags that Lightroom already wrote.
• Make rating, tagging and tag searching easy.
• Make exporting to JPEG with presets easy.

I gave DarkTable a try, and it's an almost. It claims to understand the sidecar XML files used by Lightroom with raw files, but I find much of the UI baffling:

• There seems to be no way to display a set of photos full screen and go through and rate them one by one.
• The interface for displaying and editing tags is confusing and ugly, especially hierarchical tags.
• Presumably there's a way to show all photos that match a tag, but I haven't found it.
• I keep getting stuck in sub-modes where I can't figure out how to get back to my list of folders, and have to quit and restart.

What else is out there?

Previously, previously, previously.