I get what you mean. I see a decent chunk of often more tech-proficient Linux users putting down Linux Mint, and it saddens me because even though I don’t use Mint anymore, it was still the first distro I properly daily-drove and I still consider it an amazing system for people who are new to Linux.
I’m very glad you’ve been having a good experience with Mint!
Use any you want. I’ve been mounting my internal secondary hard drive on /mnt for well over a year now and haven’t had any problems. Previously, I mounted it on
~/Storage
and it also worked fine (though only because I’m the only user in my computer; dual-user systems would result in the other user being unable to access the hard drive).