After a sibling commenter very patiently pointed out that I was holding it wrong - I would encourage taking another look at this project if only to try out the Painting mode.

It does produce some very cool results: https://imgur.com/LQuo4UM

Had the press release/tutorial emphasized this angle instead of the wonky text-to-image thing, my initial impression would have been a lot better. This is genuinely a really neat feature. All my UI and discoverability criticism stands though!