I agree with your analysis. I studied German and Italian in college and picked up a other languages along the way. Learning Italian was more fun than Deutsch and helped me to read French and Spanish. Reading Hegel and Neitzche in German was daunting. In high school we had an exchange teacher come in for one year. We all acquired a Schwabisch accent. My professors were amazed when we recited in class because he claimed we sounded like natives.
I learned one year of French in first year of high school, and then dropped it for German in the following year. As someone who has none of English/French/German as a first language and from an Asian background, I found learning a second or third European language using English as a medium of instruction helps my English indirectly as well. Some grammar points in English were not understood properly until I learned French from scratch.
From a comparative perspective as an outsider, I feel French have more complicated vocabularies, pronounciations are a nightmare, and puzzling gender information for nouns, but since most of the "big words" in English are borrowed from French, it means often you can make an educated guess about specific meanings of French vocabularies without using a dictionary if you know English, and its grammar is far simpler than English (no continuous or perfect tenses).
German is more complicated in overall grammar structure, but it is very logical, and compounding nouns make memorizing English vocabularies look trivial. And more importantly there are no "exceptions" in grammar that will trip you up as in English.
That was 15 years ago. I think I can recall more of my German learned than French, but living in this part of the world French is probably more useful as a tool than German (French is still a world language, while German is just a pan-European language).
Ping!
Ha! Bisch sicher? I be so an rächter Sauschwoab ond komm vo dr Alb ra.
This is real hard-core Swabian accent from the place where I was born - the Swabian Alb. Most Germans north of Tübingen are unable to understand even one word. Thank God! ;-)