>My concern overall is that, people saying that it is a pretty good product for simpler page design suggests strongly to me that there's something basic that I'm missing. [surely people don't rate a product as 'pretty good' with this kind of useability]
What I was trying to say is that I don't think that this is the fault of FrontPage, but a fault of HTML. HTML lacks the ability to say exactly where you want something placed.
-cjh