Relate this to some recent research that, unsurprisingly, proved how racist people are less empathic towards people of other races. Empathy is a vital indicator of many other human characteristics being its premise. I perceive it falling, clearly, in Italy (trust me, I have sufficient experience with young people); but... I cannot honestly tell why it does so sharply. I can point some obvious causes; for instance, the raise of families with a single child. Single children usually too late discover they're not the centre of the world. As for computer gaming, when I was young, I played with my ZX Spectrum and my classmates had it too, or they had the Commodore 64. We played a lot, honestly, so I cannot think of video gaming as an issue.
But there is really one thing that is so evident that I cannot imagine why it so underestimated: I'm talking of the quality of TV series for children. [Living in Italy, I may miss some correct title]. Of course we had some police stuff, but think about "Eight is Enough", "Little House on the Prairie", even "My friend Arnold", though set in the world of rich people, really thaught you something. Families had problems, real problems; I mean, life was hard and shows were close to reality by many aspects, we really suffered of the sufference of figures in the show. Young people in the current TV shows for children live in a sort of colourful, forever-happy world. They get over any (ridiculous) problem in matter of minutes. They cannot acquire our children empathy because they are just meant to be happy and funny. I do not know about the USA panorama, but it is very difficult in Italy to make young people watch some TV show that really can tell them something.

I've been using Gimp for a long time and what I miss more is the lack of the 16bit/channel support. Basic shapes cannot be trivially drawn, too, it's a pity, though there are plugins and some tricks with the selection tools. In general, you would not find Gimp an all-purpose tool though quite advanced. Gimp is the only tool that I've used in both Linux and Win, otherwise all under Linux.
Cinepaint is great with pictures, quite more oriented for that field, has 16bit/channel and tools like those to change the "exposure" are quite good. It is a bit unstable, this is not so good, and some tools do not work as you'd expect (for instance you may get stuck with a copy-and-paste if not working under the right colour depth). Also, the interface is really outdated, everybody's hope is that the new development cycle will make it better.
Krita is potentially very interesting for a number of reasons, first of all its flexibility with plugins. I have high expectations regarding it. Alas, it is yet a bit incomplete according to me but what stopped me from using it is that it crashes each time I try to load a very large TIFF in it (~4500x3000 16 bit/channel sRGB). Maybe it's that specific TIFF format, I did not check.
But most of all, I think that your problem shall be seen from a different perspective: even Photoshop may be not the best choice for doing some things (often an overkill, hardly it will not let you do it). Many things depend on the workflow and maybe you will find out that what you usually do can be perfectly worked out with some open source or cheap tools.
Those things that you do not need to do often and that you cannot complete with one tool, may require a couple of them, but as long as they are uncommon that would not choke your work. Find out what you really do most often!
As for colour management, it may be a have been a pain in Linux buit things are improving fast. Stay tuned...