Dang it, I liked the aesthetic of the Casio, but now I'll never unsee it.

Who needs zaratsu when you have the legendary TinSkin 3.0?

There are older cameras that lack bells and whistles but are still very capable of taking professional-level shots--it's mostly a matter of working with lighting and knowing what tools you have. A Canon T6i or T7i, Nikon D3400, will be solid DSLR options with plenty of lenses to choose from. If you eventually want to step up in price, the Sony Alpha a6000 series is fantastic--I know people who love them, and my main camera is the Alpha A7RII (the big brother of the a6000). For lenses, you may want to try something like a 50mm prime lens--prime lenses can't zoom, but that's less of an issue in a controlled environment, and they can open up wider, which lets in more light (useful for dimmer indoor scenarios) and narrows the depth of field, giving you nice blurry backgrounds and isolating the subject better. I have some fully manual Soviet-era lenses that I love (they're a bit like Vostoks--objectively, they're not great, but they're super fun to use and cost a fraction of what new professional lenses do).

This watch gets the time from an atomic clock by radio, so I never have to set it, and it's solar-powered, so I never have to change the battery.

I believe my introduction to the world of mechanical watches was from a video of Marshall's (restoring an old military watch with radioactive lume). I'm still more of an onlooker than active collector, so I always enjoy watching him work--educational and entertaining.