I am also from the IT realm and find when I "challenge" EQ, it doesn't deliver as well as it should. I wonder if people without heavy computer backgrounds tend not to get frustrated with what it SHOULD be able to do, because they don't realize that it should be able to do that, thus find it easy to use.
I am really proficient with Photoshop and would much rather use PS or Photoshop Elements for quilt design over EQ. Of course, you can't do yardage calcs and things like that in Photoshop, but it's fairly easy to set all of that up with Excel.