You will get many, many opinions about this. I personally find EQ easy to learn and use, however there are people who struggle with it. My favorite way of using it is to audition my ideas to see if they look ridiculous or awesome before investing all my time and fabric.
You might check into buying it used from someone. I bought EQ7 used for my mom from someone who didn't use it as much as she thought she would. There were no problems at all transferring the ownership and activations.