I can see you've already given this a great deal of thought, and that's good, also spending time with another handler is I'm sure useful. I personally don't believe in telling strangers whether they should or shouldn't get a service dog, I don't know you and even if I did, I'm not qualified to prescribe things to people.
One thing that I will note though is that I hope your family member has shared with you that the challenges go way, way beyond being held up by complete strangers on the sidewalk who have questions. Yes, that does happen, but that is actually not terribly hard to deal with most of the time. Acquaintances and people who you will have to deal with in more than a passing way can also be very challenging. Some of the more frustrating aspects can be:
- strangers who actually get angry and argue with you or say cruel things if you say no either to petting or to answering questions
- being the focus of attention in every space you're in (that one's relatively manageable, I've learned to avoid eye contact so that I can't see who's staring at me or watching me)
- being constantly watched by strangers who are looking for "slip ups", eg your dog making a mistake (which will happen, they're not robots), and then being chastised for it, or passive-aggressively commented at (examples from memory: "well what kind of service dog is *that*" (that was when my dog faulted and broke heel the first time we walked past a very enticing urban dog park; we'd been home from team training all of about a week at that point); "none of the service dogs I've seen would do that" (that was in reference to my dog's ears perking up when she made eye contact and greeted it); "careful puppy or you'll get retired early haha!" (that was in response to the dog making a slight false start at the wrong floor on an elevator)
- being interrupted when you're trying to focus on things, eg paying for things at a cash etc
- this one is something that i find very difficult: having the dog become the focus literally everywhere I go, including professional and/or medical environments where it has nothing to do with the disability for which i have the dog. That doesn't sound like a big deal probably, but I often need to do other things (banking, medical care, volunteering, buy a couch or a car, you know, life stuff), and I need to focus on other things. But I cannot get anyone to focus on what we're there for until I first let them have their little moment of excitement, then ask them to please focus on what we're there to do, and sometimes even then they still don't get it, they'll focus for a minute but then switch back to "it's just sooo hard though, she's so beautiful..."
- anger management skills will be tested, just fyi. both in terms of dealing with other people, but also the dog will test you.
None of that is meant to encourage or discourage you, it's meant to hopefully provide a picture of some of the downsides to being assisted by a service animal. You will be treated differently. society really is still not comfortable with visible disability. not everyone, but some people will infantilize you etc. People with physical disabilities deal with that, but people with invisible disabilities can "pass", unless they start walking around with a dog in a vest.