Lament: Even abandoned for years, Ventura is better than Scribus today

Let me be clear, I am not trying to start a fight pro/con any other software.  But I recently tried to use Scribus (v1.5.4) to do a modest length (19 page) document with two levels of headings, where most of the 2nd level sections had an associated image frame.  And I hated the experience.  I had to create separate text frames for every heading, individually set attributes on each one so they would appear in a table of contents, and manually shift frames throughout the entire document every time the text was edited, which meant more splitting or merging of frames as they crossed page boundaries (and resetting of attributes in most cases).  And every time the TOC was regenerated, I had to go in and manually reapply all the TOC paragraph styles.

There are still things about "long" (even 2-page!) documents that Ventura does effortlessly that are long, manual, repetitive slogs in other layout programs.  At the moment, Scribus doesn't even have the concept of anchoring something relative to the text flow.  The interaction of anchors and layout, especially with overlaid frames set to exclude text, is quite difficult, so I'm very sympathetic to some glitches here and there.  But the closest Scribus comes to anchors is with footnotes/endnotes (which are prone to crash it).  There's absolutely nothing like anchoring images frames to the associated text paragraph, much less anchoring caption frame(s) to one of those image frames.

Frankly, the mental model for working with Scribus is "complete all text edits entirely, prepare all images, then lay out the document once."  This is the philosophy, given in writing, by several of its development team.  That's just not practical.  I cannot think of any 20-50 page chapter that I've had anything to do with that did not get at least 5-10% paragraph edits after the first laid out proof was ready, despite all pleas to authors and editors to get changes made earlier.

This particular release of Scribus has other unwelcome failings, like replicating the text flow through a bunch of linked frames 10 to 20 times sequentially.  (I have not yet sorted out the trigger for this, but it's probably related to unlinking and relinking text frames).  That, at least, is easy to detect and fix, because the replicas all get tacked on the end of the text flow, rather than scrambled into the middle somewhere.

Sadly, I will not be able to eke out much more life from my install of Ventura.  V10 on Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit, has quite a few display bugs.  The old "disappearing text" problem from V8 runs wild in V10 on 64-bit.

So, I'd appreciate hearing what layout tools you have moved to from Ventura, and your experiences with the transition.  And join me in a lament for a lost great software.