> It takes about an hour of use to get there, honestly
I assume you have a great deal of previous drawing experience? In my experience, people without tens of thousands of hours of drawing experience find it extremely difficult to adapt to using a wacom tablet to control the mouse. I’m sure it can be done, but an hour is an incredibly optimistic time estimate.
I've been using tablets since 1995 or so, and I can hardly write legibly, let alone draw. My motivation was realizing how much I preferred the trackpad on my PowerBook to a mouse, and the lack of any decent desktop trackpads at the time. So I tried the tablet, which worked even better!
One tip: try the various sizes of tablet, as tastes differ; some find the larger tablets tiring, others find the smaller tablets fidgety, and, in my own experience, display size also plays an important role (the "large" Intuos is perfect paired with a 27" display, for instance, while the "small" feels more natural paired with a MacBook Air; while you can compensate by restricting the active area on the tablet, I've never been a big fan of doing so, nor with spanning the tablet area across multiple displays).
For the record, I'm a photographer, not a graphic artist. Sure, I doodled a bit as a kid and have tried my hand at drawing from time to time (who hasn't?) but tens of thousands of hours is at least an order of magnitude off as an estimate, and the time I did put in wasn't consistent or contiguous.
I assume you have a great deal of previous drawing experience? In my experience, people without tens of thousands of hours of drawing experience find it extremely difficult to adapt to using a wacom tablet to control the mouse. I’m sure it can be done, but an hour is an incredibly optimistic time estimate.