Bookkeeping wasn't super hard to figure out when I started using GNUCash in grad school. Really the most painful part was importing history from shitty local bank records.
I don't import history from my bank - I find manual reconciliation fairly quick and quite useful - but I share your pain with dealing with banks. QIF is a useless format for double entry systems.
GNUCash lets you do separate import and reconciliation steps. The problem was the bank didn't support OFX. Or maybe even QIF, it was a long time ago and I was naieve.
