Very interesting! This reminds me of how stumped I was learning about UV unwrapping for texturing. Even simple models are difficult to unwrap into easily editable textures. "Why can't I just draw on the model?"

Blender has a few plugins these days that make it a lot easier --- one that impressed me was Mio3 UV: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mio3-uv/