Not really a point to be made, just a preference.

I never liked two panel. Back when Gnome 2 was around I would always combine them into one bar at the bottom. Seems like wasted vertical space to have two when one can do the same stuff.

I had the same issue running fedora kinoite on an old laptop with integrated Radeon graphics. Scrambled video when waking from suspend, and even if it does start to look normal its still pretty much frozen.