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I'm a little confused about the problems you're having. I write
literally hundreds of pages in InDesign and don't mind it, and I'm
fairly picky :-) Perhaps it's the way your pages are set up that's the
sticking point? Also, it imports Word surprisingly well if you take the
time to reconcile the Word styles to InDesign styles. If the Word
documents didn't have styles rigorously applied to begin with, then as
you say nothing works well.
What made all of the difference with InDesign was building a set of
paragraph styles, character styles, and page masters, which in turn I
saved as a template. I use only the styles for formatting, which allows
me to switch style definitions and automatically reformat a document. My
page masters have a single text frame that fills each page, and text
flows automatically from page to page. Almost all figures are anchored
to their respective text so that they follow along in the layout as I
add or subtract content. No figures are embedded, and all are
referenced from Version Cue (which provides version control). Set up
that way, using InDesign isn't significantly different from Frame except
that I have the added capabilities from Version Cue thrown in.
Numbered lists are trivial to set up and are extremely flexible. Any
paragraph style can be set to be a numbered list. I have styles for
steps and sub-steps, figure numbers, table numbers, etc. Actually, the
InDesign approach to numbering has a lot more power than most systems as
each list counter has a name, which can be referenced by text variables
or other lists.
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