So countless hours of tutorials and books later, I ended up using InDesign. It's the best tool you can use. Out of curiosity, have you checked out Quark XPress

So countless hours of tutorials and books later, I ended up using InDesign. It's the best tool you can use. Out of curiosity, have you checked out Quark XPress at all? I very much prefer Quark to InDesign, given the choice. Its UI feels better laid out and was easier for me to get started in. However, Quark is worse than Adobe when it comes to pricing products, so a single license of XPress will run a large chunk of change. So its not normally an option, unfortunately.