Actually SP development is much more straight forward now that you can develop the apps with Visual Studio. Or, though there is a cost, Nintex has an excellent product suite that makes it easy to build complex workflows and forms using a visual interface. Basically, Microsoft did - with SP 2010 - what IBM should have done with XPages - used a good IDE to make developing existing and new existing features with the product easier while integrating standards (as they were doing with ASP.NET MVC).
Actually SP development is much more straight forward now that you can develop the apps with Visual Studio. Or, though there is a cost, Nintex has an excellent product suite that makes it easy to build complex workflows and forms using a visual interface. Basically, Microsoft did - with SP 2010 - what IBM should have done with XPages - used a good IDE to make developing existing and new existing features with the product easier while integrating standards (as they were doing with ASP.NET MVC).