It is either a vote for one or a vote for the other, voting third party or not voting is exactly the same as voting for the winner.

That's just not true. Due to how the Electoral College works, unless you live in one of the swing states (usually about 8 states), your vote literally will not impact the outcome of the election, so the best way you can use it is to vote for a third party to inform your elected officials of your voting preferences. If a third party is getting a lot of support, they'll change their policies a bit to cater to those voters. If you do live in a swing state, then yeah, pick the lesser of two evils.

I absolutely think the Electoral College has its place, but we need to be able to split votes. My state (Utah) is about 60% Republican, 35% Democrat, but it goes 100% to Republicans every time. We have 6 electoral college votes, so theoretically 3-4 should go to Republicans, 2-3 should go to Democrats, and one could go to a popular third party or flip between the two major party candidates. But no, all 6 go to the Republican candidate, even if they are unpopular (e.g. Trump got all 6 with only 45% of the vote in Utah in 2016). Some states allow splitting votes, but most don't, so it ends up sucking way more than it should.

The benefit of an Electoral College is that it skews power from the high-population states toward the lower-population states, which I think has value (i.e. so we don't screw over farmers too much). However, the all-or-nothing approach just leads to lower voter turnout (why vote if your vote won't matter anyway?).

I think we should move toward proportional representation, both in the Electoral College and our state representatives. It's absolutely silly that we can just gerrymander our way to a massive majority whenever a state has a simple majority (e.g. all four reps in Utah are Republican, despite having >1/4 of the population voting Democrat). I think we can do that w/o a Constitutional amendment, but neither party seems to want that because they like having clear majorities in most states.