The trick with drywall is to avoid all the extra effort. Your drive for the perfect surface limited your options when, at the beginning you had a universe of potential outcomes. You chose for it to become monotonically flat.

When my mom was in her late 60's having never done any work with drywall or mud, taping, floating, etc and attempting to make lemonade out of a situation where every room in the house was being sheetrocked because Dad was actively using some of his many skills to convert their house into a home, she became creative and produced a collection of decorative walls that anyone could admire.

There are rag-rolled walls with layers of colors over imperfect textures. There are walls painted a neutral background color and then combed with spectacular streaks. Some rooms are wavy and others are vertical lines. She layered colors and textures because the drywall, after all the work was done had textural flaws and places where use of a single color would make all the imperfections pop like Shiprock from the New Mexico plain. It was hard making 1/4" (6.3mm) drywall hide all the changes to the structure and the shiplap that had happened in the 80 years (80 years) since the house was built.

My favorite walls are in a hallway with nearly 10' (~3m) ceilings. She used a variable depth texture, thicker than anywhere else in the house and knocked relatively flat though with plenty of knife swirls randomly distributed. In the heavy texture she used a leaf print to impress hundreds of oak leaves from floor to ceiling in random orientations as if they are all falling. The colors are autumn colors with a light base and darker accents that create additional shadowing. It really is beautiful and is quite original.

Every time I walk that hallway I hear:

The leaves are falling all around, time I was on my way.

Thanks to you I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay.

But now it's time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way.

With the original oak hardwood floor painted a nice checkerboard pattern and the trim all Dad's handiwork it is really great.

Flat surfaces seem like such a modern obsession. I feel the attraction, but defiantly try to oppose the gravity.

At least you limited yourself to human scale hand-y work.

An engineer type can go down some dark yak holes trying to find solutions to achieve inhuman flatness

Yet the same skill that leads to perfect flatness then also leads to being able to make something look organic and natural, should they so wish.

It's about honing ability and competence.

The taste for perfect imperfection.

I only just learnt about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

Perhaps "artisinal" encompasses the idea?

Ira Glass is imperfect perfectionism.

I don't mind the old walls in my house with their lumps and bumps, but I do mind the half assed drywall job I hired out with poorly sanded joints, oversized electrical cutouts and other flaws.

Id love to develop the skill for drywall, but then amount of mess and dust it creates is too much for me and my SO. Even if I did it off site, taking a shower and changing clothes every time is a hassle.

Is it really more of a hassle than going exercising or anything else with special gear? Hiking / skiing / swimming?

Yes. The fine dust gets everywhere. Imagine rolling around in the sand at the beach, but 10x worse. Skiing, what, you turn the corner of the mountain and there's a snow maker running full bore at you so you're a little bit cold but then the snow melts into water when you do get inside. You're all suited up but it's okay because it's cold outside. You could wear a tyvek suit to do drywall, but then you're sweating too much to do the job.