There’s a lot of confusion here:

- There is no double taxation if you just pay yourself a salary (since it’s a normal business expense). If you want to take money out of the company flexibly, a GmbH is the wrong structure.

- I’ve never heard of anybody doing an UG/GmbH + KG to get started. This is highly unusual. Most people either do just a simple UG or maybe they set up a holding structure with two separate GmbH / UG entities.

- Related to the above: if you go with a simple, standard structure you will incur minimal legal fees. You don’t need a lawyer, you just directly task a notary and tell them you want a standard setup.

- If you don’t want the complexity of a limited liability company, the standard way to reduce liability risk is to get liability insurance. Many, many people do this instead of having a GmbH.

The valid criticism is the a) lack of digital processes and b) sequential processing of steps that could happen in parallel. For example, I sped up my own GmbH process by driving to the register court and paying in cash on-site. For whatever reason that’s much faster and saves about a week.