I'm a little bit on a different boat here but I have been struggling with really bad thumb pain related to my work for the past 2 years. I'm sharing a couple of things here in case someone is struggling with the same issue but I would also love to hear if anyone has been struggling with thumb pain as well and found…
another alternative method is to use a basic normal map shader - paint into the map with photoshop (rtt a sphere to a plane normal map gives a good palette picker) or a 3d paint app (to give you your "real time" interface) then do a map to map channel (IIRC there a free plug that does this) then do a map channel to normals…