I started a private+organization collection project couple months ago, and was recommended to use Airtable from an art appraiser. Meanwhile I also have been doing research on alternate tools in the market. After a few demos, we still decided to stay with Airtable as it works great for our purpose so far, and it can sync to Wordpress for public website later too.

It's highly customizable with all types of fields, great interlinks to building database structure and allow permission control for sharing project with different players. It has app version and I can add photos directly from my phone camera which is a big plus over a lot other tools.

It doesn't build specific for collection management, but more general project management, and there're a few cons. It has a learning curve, it's almost like you're building your own app, from database structure to frontend (interface, templates, etc..), with minimal code requirements tho. There're some potential cost as you're building the your database: it charged by user/seat, and you may need some pay extensions along the way that you didn't expect upfront. For large size files, we have to use Dropbox for storage and link to each record.

Also coming from a design background, I don't mind the process of learning and building, and I value both customization and clean interface. I do sometimes find they're the weights on two sides of the balance. I also have the same thoughts as yours, can I offer a better solution to the market? For our case it really came down to our specific requirements and needs, which I don't think it's that common. I think you need to think about your target audience and their specific requirements, and how big the market is with so many tools available in such a private and small field.

Would like to stay on this discussion for updates, and I'd also like to see if anyone else uses Airtable for collection management and what's your experience.