Yep, it does help. 
I don’t mind tinkering, with one condition – I want to have one brainless and JustWorks™ desktop environment + window manager combo which I can come back to at any time if I get tired of tinkering.
I admit I didn’t remember this detail that you shared:
But now that I did it makes sense, plus I remembered doing something very similar long time ago, so that’s giving me a peace of mind that I can screw around and do the famous “Linux rices” and if/when I get fed up I can just re-auth the user and go to XFCE. Very helpful, thanks!
I agree that this will likely be off-putting at first but meh – I plan to make Linux a long-term, if not lifetime, home for my computing so I am sure in just a few weeks I’ll get used to all the specifics.