That’s more secure than most setups, the VPN with killswitch will defeat any and all attacks you’re likely to encounter if you don’t open files on that same VM.

FDE is for physical attackers, it would have nothing to do with torrenting unless you’re really intending on pissing off every single criminal legal authority and not just worried about civil suits from copyright holders.

I think you’re vastly underestimating how cheap most computers are; consumer laptops are around $300-500 median, that’s what most people use. And those laptops don’t game. The enthusiast computer market, while larger than its ever been, is still a ridiculously small percentage of computers sold.

Developers are too often bad engineers.

This I agree with, but would excuse it by simply stating investment isn’t there for proper engineering standards. I’d love to produce bug-free tested to reasonably unbreakable, ethically implemented code every single time. But I’d be out of a job pretty quickly and replaced by someone willing to do it faster with more critical bugs and no thought of the ethical implications of a failure.

Python is legitimately the best language by far for the vast majority of non-performance critical tasks, and most tasks that need to be developed for are not performance critical.