Qgis is powerful and free but it’s slow, has the steepest learning curve and gets in your way. I am happy it exists but it’s not great.

If using an Apple silicon Mac, it will be way faster after if you install (compile from source) via Mac ports.

As far as learning curve, I agree, but I have had a lot of luck as a beginner asking ChatGPT how to use qgis to do specific tasks and it walked me through them in detail correctly.