That is a really beautiful map, and I admire your perserverence with manually making those mountain ranges. Are
1) Have some rep, even if it isn't finished.
2) The path tool is not terribly hard to use once you get used to it. If you've ever worked with Illustrator, you'll find it's actually very friendly. I would suggest just making sharp lines initially and using the editing tool to curve them, and graduating when you feel comfortable to modifying the lines as you make them. You can tackle the problem at that step of lines not bending in the direction you want them by clicking the end point and acting like you were going to bend it more, but doing nothing. I've found that that tends to reset the curves.

Assuming you're going to fill it in more, I'm looking forward to seeing how you label things. I've found that there are surprisingly few free fonts for modern-looking maps, but Chanticleer Roman has worked well at least for me for serifs, and the default fonts can provide sans-serifs.