I had a similar experience. I tried Blender for 10 minutes and the UI was unintuitive and just awful. Completely backwards from everything else.

A few years later, someone said I should try it again. It's finally good. And they were right. My whole team uses Blender now and we're very satisfied with it.

I've heard the same thing with GIMP: "Try it again. It's good now." Unfortunately, this isn't true and likely will never be.

Try Krita