You should always work to your own goals.  There's no benefit in taking extra time to make results you don't like passable.  I use linear workflow because it's the quickest way for me to get the results I want.  I do optimize my lights and materials for it, but since I tailor my lights and materials to my scenes and only use preset lights for testing, it's not such a big deal.  If you find not using GC gives you the results you want, then stick with it.  TBH, I haven't found the changes in lighting so consistent to find even the experience of changing lighting helpful.  I find it easiest to just build my lighting from scratch when I change a major rendering parameter.

Again, to be honest, I think this is the big problem people have with using GC.  They take a scene entirely built for one workflow then try to apply another.  And lots of people have all this advice for how to change everything, but that takes a huge amount of effort and you probably won't match the vision you built using the other workflow.  If you want to use a new workflow, start with a new empty scene and add your elements one by one, adjusting as you go.  It's much quicker and easier.