More seriously than my previous response.
> I wish someone would just dump a bunch of money, hire former Windows/Mac devs and properly build a lot of the supporting components of some distro, then all the other distros can roll up those better apps and then we have at least something that can be called adequate in 2021
My point is not that you're wrong to feel this way, but rather that you should recognize that "adequate" is ultimately subjective. Adequate for whom? Adequate how?
The Linux ecosystem is largely designed by and for people who are willing to tinker, willing to customize, who want to design software that scratches their own itches, and who aren't looking for a perfect out-of-the-box experience from a distro. A handful of people want to bring about "the year of Linux on the desktop", but they're a minority and even for them the interest is usually secondary to their own use of Linux.
There's no "twisting your words" required here. What you want is a near-perfect out of the box Linux experience. What most Linux users want is ... something else. My point is simply that that's okay. Linux doesn't have to be for everyone. Your problems with it are not everyone's problems with it. In particular,
> that unfortunately makes it a non-starter if you are looking for a direct replacement for macOS or Windows.
Most Linux users don't want a direct replacement for macOS or Windows. Maybe there's a class of "theoretical Linux switchers" out there who would switch and would be the majority of Linux users if they did, but they are not, at present, the majority of the people using and working on Linux.
What Linux provides me with is (a) a well-integrated package manager containing fully free/libre software, (b) a comprehensible system (where I can understand fully how each part works), and (c) a modifiable system (where I can change how the system operates to the extent I want). Having a perfect replacement of the MS Paint application is not even on my radar. But that said:
> Plus "paint" is a near-instant loading app that is several MB in size whereas Pinta is installing loads of supporting libraries because it is a more complex application.
Maybe you're exaggerating, but on my system Pinta has an installed size of only 2.88 MiB and has only two direct dependencies. Maybe you're thinking of the fact that it's written in Mono (the C# runtime), but that's a shared installation with all other Mono applications. It's equivalent to Windows shipping with the .NET runtime or UWP.