I want to like it, but GIMP is almost unusable for me. Really hard to do even basics, and have to spend a lot of time googling how to do what I want to do.
You wouldn't expect Photoshop to be immediately usable for a newbie either. I've always been completely stumped by Photoshop, but I haven't spent enough time in it to expect otherwise.
True, but I've been using GIMP a long time - more than a decade. Used it for years longer and years before I used Adobe CS. Taken a number of tutorials on it. Will always be super clunky.