I’d suggest that you start with a straight. The more nuanced strokes all work best with a straight paddle, and the nature and details of many of your questions suggests to me that you’d do well to work on such nuances. Later, when you have better skills, you can make up your mind which you prefer, and, importantly, under what conditions.
As much as I respect Cliff Jacobson, his do-it-this-way mentality often comes through in the absence of details, and also often overlooks the fact that not everyone thinks in the same way and won’t necessarily agree with what to him is “irrefutable evidence”. For example, the very first thing he says is that four days of C-stroking wrecked the nerves in one hand because he couldn’t tolerate twisting his wrist all that time. Well, first, plenty of people have no trouble with the wrist motion (maybe when I’m older than dirt like C.J. is, I’ll think differently), but more to the point, he never did get around to explaining why the bent-shaft solved that problem (in fact, his solution to the problem had nothing to do with what kind of paddle he used). When you try C- or J-stroking with both paddle types, I think you’ll see that the wrist action for both is virtually the same (only the angle of the shaft itself, relative to the boat, due to gunwale-clearance issues, ends up being different during correction, NOT the degrees of rotation of the shaft, and thus, NOT the amount that you twist your wrist. In short, it takes the same amount of twist to rotate the orientation of the blade of bent-shaft paddle 90 degrees as it does with a straight shaft!). Second, I don’t see his explanation for the bent-shaft running closer to the keel line making any sense except in very special circumstances (that’s why I mentioned the differences in shaft angle relative to the boat for the two paddle types during correction, above, but I’d rather not try to explain that all the way right now).
All that is nothing against bent-shaft paddles, as they do have special advantages, especially for easy, straight cruising. One thing, and this was vaguely alluded to in one of those articles, is that a paddling motion that involves keeping the upper arm mostly straight and simply letting that arm drop downward while applying forward power, is very easy on your body, and the bent-shaft really shines with that method (it’s much more efficient in that situation). Sit-and-switchers will obviously find the bent-shaft better, but those who do correction strokes have a bigger learning curve and a bigger “awkward factor” to deal with when using a bent-shaft. Lots of people have, with practice, gotten really good at correction strokes with bent-shaft paddles, but learning those strokes with a straight-shaft is easier. And again, dabbling in the great variety of strokes that are possible, often just for the satisfaction of playing around with such things, works best with, and sometimes actually requires, a straight-shaft.
So the answer is that either type of paddle might be fine for you, but not because either is fine in every instance, but because one is better in certain ways and the other is better in certain other ways. Again, I think you’d do well to start with the basics (straight), then branch out.