The Gimp and Krita

Warning: this can be considered as a rant, needed needed to get back to a normal state after 2 frustrating hours of work with the gimp and krita

I tried to make a banner for the Profoss, and failed miserably. I had a template, and just had to fill in the text. But the background was a bit too dark on the right, and I wanted to make it lighter but gradually, as the left was fine. It was impossible (for me) to find a way to do that (there was a pattern in the background), so I went for a plain background.

The main reason of the failure is I'm not a designer. It's not that I'm a bad designer, I'm worse than that. But combined with unintuitive tools as The Gimp and Krita, it ended up in a catastrophe. Here are examples:

• in Gimp, I ended up not being able to draw with the brush anymore. I had done it 10 minutes earlier, but when I tried again I couldn't. I searched if there was a selection, if I was on a bad layer, but I couldn't change its behaviour to doing what I wanted: draw with the brush
  
• in Krita I didn't even find the brush tool!
• I didn't find the option to add text with the border of the letters in another color than the body of the letter. This is easy to do with Inkscape eg, but doesn't seem possible with those tools.

Is is me that is not understanding the tools, or is such a frustrating experience normal with these tools for a beginner like me? Whatever the reason, I don't even want to know it: I won't try the experience again anytime soon....