After a few months with Lion, I've decided to partition my iMac's hard drive and install OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as a secondary OS. Lion is quite a strange beast to get along with these days. It has generally better support for modern applications than Snow Leopard but it lacks support for many older versions of useful applications thanks to the lack of Rosetta rendering it unable to run PowerPC applications. Snow Leopard is also generally a much more stable and satisfying OS to use, even after just 30 minutes of use after recording this video, it feels so much nicer.
I did want to get an SSD into my iMac before conducting this install but I won't have that kind of spare time / energy for quite a while, these smaller less-awesome projects will have to do for now.