I see that you dedicated a paragraph to NTFS. There are quite a lot of people saying there are problems with gaming on Linux using an NTFS drive but I’ve rarely (never?!) seen anyone actually having problems with it. I myself have been dual booting for years and some games are on an NTFS drive shared between Linux and windows for convenience and I never had any issues besides the fact I had to disable fast reboot in Windows.
I don’t even symlink compatdata and haven’t run into any problems. The whole NTFS thing is wild :D