Correct. LXQt is better looking, and supposedly even lighter on resources, but the LXQt distro I got was corrupted -- that's what locked me out of the computer. To switch to LXQt now, which I would like to do, will mean installing it mmanually over the existing OS.
This... isn't quite right.
You must not think of Linux systems the same as Windows, where you get an OS as a big monolithic thing. When you pick a linux distribution, you're really getting a image where someone has selected and bundled a bunch of different packages together, along with the config, and made sure it all plays nicely.
As an end user, you can add your own packages, remove packages, upgrade them or change them out. And the desktop environment is... just a series of packages. You can add or remove them as you see fit. There can be dragons here, dependency conflicts and whatnot - but it's not correct to think that because you picked an image with a particular desktop environment on it, you're stuck with that.