Sure there's an extra selection and a tool change but this way it's a lot more versatile than having a simple single purpose draw-me-a-box tool. Learn the keyboard shortcuts and get over it.

Need a pattern filled box? Do the selection and use pattern fill.

Need a box with a circular hole in the middle, with fill and outline stroke. Select a box, then select a circle with difference selection. Then fill with outline color, shrink selection by few pixels and fill with pattern. Or first fill with pattern fill and do an outset/inset selection.

I'm sure Photoshop has a super versatile tool for doing boxes and circles. A real swiss army knife that rounds your corners and does drop shadows. And that's fine. But it's a different design choice than GIMP did.

In my opinion, GIMP is nice because it has simple tools that are composable, repeatable and scriptable. Kinda like the unix philosophy gone GUI.

If you don't grok it, it may be difficult. If you do and don't like it, that's your choice. But don't be impolite about it then.

The PS shape tool provides the building blocks for designing interfaces. Shapes can be scaled and merged; you can edit the vector paths and use them as masks; and much more.

Interface design requires only a fraction of Photoshop's functionality, but that is what is missing from Gimp. For image editing it might be a decent choice, but not this.

For instance Gimp also doesn't have "smart sharpening", a very useful filter that Photoshop users will recognize immediately.

Applying this filter in Gimp is more complicated, involving several steps (do a search on Google for tutorials), but in the process of applying such filters you'll learn a lot about image composition and about various tricks you can mix and match for other effects.

And the nice thing about it is that Gimp is so extensible that you can write a plugin for it, so you don't have to repeat those steps every time. You can do so with Python or Scheme. Heck, if you search around, somebody else probably wrote a good one.

So when using Gimp, don't expect a Photoshop clone, because it isn't.

Edit: downvotes, huzzah ... it's what I use for website design, only really turn to Gimp for more complex bitmap changes, cutouts and photo touchup. I cant imagine trying to do web UI in Gimp alone, hence the suggestion.

circle: circle select, alt+e s s

I guess it's not intuitive if you haven't done a gimp 101 tutorial for 30 minutes. Here it is in pictures: https://pbs01.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/145/