Yeah, PnP’s are hugely complex - but that’s also what makes it so fun!
For 2D I mainly use Photoshop. As much as I’ve tried to find an alternative because I really don’t want to be giving Adobe $$ every month, for digital painting nothing is quite on par despite Photoshop having essentially stagnated for a very, very long time now. If it works, don’t “fix” it I guess? I’ve tried Krita, Clip Studio Paint, Affinity Photo, and a few more, and they each have their drawbacks. Of those, Clip Studio Paint is the runner up, followed by Affinity Photo, then Krita. For the actual drawing part of it, I picked up an XP-Pen 22R Pro display tablet, which is quite nice for the price - you’re certainly not getting a Wacom Cintiq Pro, but for something that costs 1/10 the price it’s an amazing bit of hardware.
For 3D I’m doing most modeling and sculpting in Blender. I don’t think I could go back to Maya or 3DS Max at this point - it’s kinda like Blender is the Vim of 3D packages, and now that I have ripped off the bandaid to learn and customized it, I’m in it for the long run, hah. That sounds worse than it is though - Blender 2.8x came out almost a year ago and was a massive, massive step forward in usability, and it’s fairly decent now (but not without its quirks/issues still).
For texturing I’ve been using Substance Designer, which is a node-based texture generation tool, and its sister product Substance Painter (which as the name implies, is for painting those generated textures onto 3D models). Once I got the hang of its UI and found a YouTube tutorial video where someone explained their thinking/rational for how they designed the node networks, it suddenly became very intuitive and easy to make exactly what I wanted. It doesn’t replace painting textures in all circumstances, but it also does so much more than you can (easily) do with painting textures by hand.
The latest tool I’ve been playing with is Marvelous Designer for cloth/fabric design for 3D. You design 2D clothing (or anything really) patterns, then stitch them together and drape them over meshes, just like you were designing real garments (MD is actually an offshoot of a tool used for real garment design). Like anything it took a while to get used to, but after a Udemy course and some YouTube videos, it became quite easy to use. I’m still figuring out how to integrate it into a workflow with Blender though.
Phew.