I’m also wondering if the curtain is hung too high. It needs to overlap the side of the tub enough to “stick”, so it down’t blow around your legs. And it needs to overlap the side of the tub enough to contain water, of course.
If the rod is hung very high, consider:
Moving the rod lower
Getting a longer shower curtain
Adding a couple of extra rows of shower-curtain-hangers between the rod and the curtain, to lower it.
During our remodel, we borrowed a closet from an adjoining bedroom, and made that into a shower with a glass door. The tub has no curtain or door.
In our last 3 homes, we’ve redone 5 bathrooms. In all of them, we went from curtains to doors on the tubs (3) and showers (2). Yeah, sliding doors on a tub aren’t optimal if you feel the need to sit on the edge of the tub - which is not anything we really feel a need to do. If that is a big deal for you, I’d imagine you could easily fold up a towel to sit on…
And I never perceived the rails as getting any more filthy than the rest of the tub/door.
If you ever use the tub as a tub, the rails are a PITA. One of the best upgrades I made to my master bathroom was removing the sliding glass door on the tub, scraping down the silicone that had held it in place, and hanging a shower curtain.
We upgraded our old fiberglass tub to a tiled. walk-in shower, with sliding glass door. We bought textured glass (it looks like raindrops on it), which doesn’t show water spots. The lower track is just an “L” to keep water in, and is easy to clean. The whole look is much, much, much nicer.
We have both. The glass door goes from floor to ceiling. We squeegee it. No shower pan. Heated concrete floor:D. The shower curtain is colorful and doesn’t attack.