Joomla, Me and all these romanic Plugins

By chance I started to use Joomla. (Soon it will be up and running, i hope so) As soon as the Joomla platform was set up, I began my plugins/components/modules hunting for the site customisation. It was such an enjoyable beginning. Massive plugins/components/modules were found and they all seemed useful to me. Anyway I installed community builder as my first component- a little struggle but works fine. Secondary I tried gallery2 bridge, as I am building a gallery for the site and this component seemed to be exactly what i need. It turned out to be a 3hrs struggle and troubles remained unsolved... a mysterious configuration terminated the whole process, as well as my enthusiasm. Their demo site is down, I dont even get to see how well it works. There is no clear instruction, not direct indication, I felt totally lost in a desert called Joomla plugin.
However, a job is a job, I have to try my best to fulfill my boss' requests...;) The third plugin I went for was Lightbox. According to these reviews it was supposed to be really easy to install and use, with a little flaw, which turned out to be another 6hrs battle... Unexplained steps, hidden tricks, (plus insufficient privilege of my account), wrong and missing code,... the combination of all these misfortunes did give me a difficult Saturday afternoon.
I dont usually read instruction unless some problems occur. Since Joomla claims to be "easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable", I thought it might not be necessary to read through the manual. It did prove me wrong.
I was asked about which CMS is better- drupal or Joomla. It's really hard to answer. Both of them have their own unique features. Drupal has a robust community forum and stable system, layout is a little too strict tho. Most of time you can tell whether a site is based on drupal at a glance. Joomla, the eye candy, does hold an irresistible attraction for users. You can alwasy find dazzling effects/functions. However, compare with drupal, the layout structure of Joomla is much more complicated. By complicated I mean, drawing a diagram of layout HTML/CSS may take an afternoon and several cups of coffee. But for user support of Joomla, there is a lot of room for improvement.
I will share my Joomla experience later. Hope no more hassles. (knock on wood)