Rule of Thirds or Not

Help me, I have fallen through the rabbit hole. This week I buckled down on research and digital editing. While I was researching, I would be looking at how to do something, and it would discuss other processes or talk about features that I did not know, so I had to look those up, and I just fell further, and further into the rabbit hole. It was a good fall though, and I learned a lot. One thing I looked into this week was the rule of thirds, which separates a photo into a 3x3 grid. It is said to be beneficial to put the subject(s) of the photo on either one of the lines or points of intersection because the eyes are naturally drawn there and it makes the photo balanced. One of the links I saw was about how controlling this rule was, and how a lot of times the photos using it were boring or had a lot of bad negative space. Instead, it showed paintings and photographs using other “rules” or techniques, like arabesque lines, dynamic symmetry, and coincidences that were not real coincidences. The resulting artwork was beautiful and very natural looking. The people or objects that I thought had been put in place for no reason at all, were actually placed where they were with great detail. Most of these techiniques were based on Gestalt psychology, which is when artists consider the photo as a whole, and not just pieces of it, which is what the rule of thirds seems to focus on. I also edited a couple of pictures, but I need to look up how to use the software. I was mostly just guessing at what certain buttons did, and could not figure out much. But here are some pictures that I edited: 

This is the link to the 10 Myths About the Rule of Thirds article that I highly recommend looking at: https://petapixel.com/2016/01/30/10-myths-about-the-rule-of-thirds/