I find both options to be not ideal, since I'd like a simple, secure and safe way of storing my pictures. But that's the way the market is.
That's very much missing the point. The non-technical option is inside that post: Backblaze. Do that twice, the second time with crashplan or carbonite, and you can keep your files safe without any trouble.
The real problem is that it can only protect the files on your computer. If you have data that's fed directly to google, there's no simple software to get it back out to where it can be backed up.
Plenty of uncomfortable chances for failure, but a few heaped handfuls of error reporting would probably be mitigation enough.
Getting the initial clone done might be a little fun, you might need to actually download the Drive folder structure to somewhere spacious so you don't run into transfer ratelimiting for the initial upload.