I haven't used Photoshop in a long time, like 10 years and I'm sure that version was out-of-date already being a public school computer. I had used GIMP before using Photoshop. Given that context, I remember Photoshop to be significantly more user friendly than GIMP is even today.
Where did you find it to be more intuitive? I'm thinking big features like iWarp vs Liquify (which is now addressed as well as similar tools, sweet) and then basic things like the default brushes are horrendous (the pepper is funny but really?) and the scale slider for editing tools is absurdly weird to use. Depending on where you click there are like 3 things that might happen and on a brush or brush-like tool 75% of the slider scale is larger than the image dimensions thus useless. I end up struggling with that slider _a lot_. Not to discredit GIMP, I've been happily using it for more than half my life, but I'm genuinely curious what parts of it you think are more intuitive than Photoshop?