If your linked clone desktop are having issues receiving group policy, you can configure the adm templates directly on the parent.  While you no longer need to worry about GPO application with it being local, you do lose some agility with this, as any change made will require a recompose.

Persona Management does a good job, provided the operating environment is designed/configured properly.  I prefer to configure folder redirection using the Persona Management GPOs, redirecting everything except AppData.  I let Persona Management handle the replication of AppData and the version NTUser files.  There are a handful of KBs with some caveats - detailing that Client Side Caching should be disabled, as well as ensuring Shared Folders is not installed as part of VMware Tools.  They also suggest to exclude AppData/Local from Persona Replication, although there are some applications that store data there (Chrome for example), so that's something that can be tested and tweaked.