Late to the conversation, but for what it's worth, I have used Adobe CC for at least 12 years. So at $14 per month I have paid over $2,000 in total. That sounds a lot but if you split a $16 bottle of wine four times a week with your spouse, that would have cost $40K over 12 years, so it's all relative. I just see it as a cost of my hobby.
I use Bridge to import photos from the camera and then use only Photoshop. I really like the flexibility that layers provide in terms of adjusting opacity on your adjustments. Lightroom just seems a bit...well...light, I suppose. Photoshop is as complex as you want it to be, or as simple as you want it to be.
There are so many online tutorials on every aspect of Photoshop that it is mind boggling.
As for system needs, I am using a PC that I bought on eBay in 2008. It has 8GB of RAM and an Intel i3 processor with four cores (I think). The best thing that I did was put Windows and other programs on an internal Solid State Drive and kept my old hard drive for file storage. For a couple of hundred bucks it really improved start-up time and overall performance.