Many grievances with GIMP stem from the way how things are done. Where Blender had a weird, but rationally thought out and consistent UX, GIMPs user interface feels weird and inconsistent — as if the way it ended up looking was the only way someone managed to get it to work using default GTK widgets.

This might seem like a luxury problem, but it is really not — an intuitive and consistent user interface is crucial in an image editor that most people fire up just to get stuff done. I'd even argue that is more important than a lot of other things.

Try out Krita as well, might be not as much geared towards photo editing, but has a much more consistent UX.