That isn't what UX is about. I am making games, and stuff that isn't simply moving things about is a core part of user experience. For example consider a game where you want to move around armies on a map. You can implement that by moving around the armies using numpad only, or you can calculate a shortest path on a mouse click to a location and show it to the user. Both allows the same kind of movement, but the second offers way better user experience which is why all modern big strategy games uses it over one step at a time movement.
> but my point is you can't just get that by changing around the ellipse select tool
I never said that a good UX was easy, I just said that the developers of GIMP didn't want to put into the work to make GIMP have good UX, and a lot of that work is redesigning the technical architecture or implementing those features the tedious ugly way. It is possible to make it decently easy to make easy to use tools for gimp, I just don't know all the details of what those tools should do exactly but I know how to build that sort of things. When making games you don't have as patient users as you have in GIMP, so you'd never get away with that kind of UX, so from my perspective when your product has GIMP's level of UX then it isn't complete as a product since it would basically ensure business failure.