.....with my wife, I can't get away with such wiping techniques. she just wants a smooth white wall and one feature wall per room (but she wants to do that herself, that's already agreed).
"Wiping techniques" might be misleading, what do you mean by that?
If you, for example, paint textured plaster, you have to apply some kind of technique. Up and down would then be the "up-down technique" or something :D :D and would show streaks.
Back then, I was recommended the cross stroke, and even with colored plaster, it still looks calm on the wall. In my opinion, such a "technique" forgives mistakes more easily.
When we applied a color glaze on top of the white textured plaster in one room, both of us doing it the same way, the learning effect was unpleasantly strong when we recognized our different cross strokes on the wall, i.e., we could see where the application stopped and continued with a ladder. Once you know that, it gets easier :D
Once we tried to be very smart and were talked into applying an expensive plaster with a specially purchased Venetian trowel. We took white as the primer color on recommendation, but nobody told us not to use Alpina or something similar for that. Two days after applying the very expensive plaster, the plaster was covered with thousands of cracks throughout the room and practically fell off the wall because the "wrong" primer color had drawn the moisture out of it. €500 down the drain :D. Maybe that's why I particularly like the textured plaster I mentioned, because that was successfully applied afterward. We even once painted it on a veneered board in a store, and it still holds wonderfully today.