I’ve been using it for quite some time now and I don’t see the issue. I mostly use Gnome and that’s kind of polished and minimalistic(?) looks very cohesive to me. But I believe the same applies to other desktop environments as well. My package manager mostly gets out of the way and I don’t have to pay too much attention to that. I even get browser extensions and all the stuff that ties into another from one and the same distro maintainers. I’ve tried other operating systems as well, but for the other ones I needed to install 50 small utilities to make it usable and those kind of fight each other as well. On Linux, I try to avoid Flatpak and I wouldn’t use Snap at all. We still(?) have most software available as proper packages.
I can see how image editing might be an issue. We have what we have and for the rest you need to get one of the commercial products running.
I went with the option with keyfiles. I keep backups of LUKS headers and keyfile in case a harddisk gets damaged. Currently have that stored as a file attachment in my password manager.