Yes, hated every minute of it.
a) Worth doing, though, and the second time round it's a lot easier.
b) Most people don't template from scratch, even when they should, they take someone else's template and adapt it.
c) It is also perfectly legitimate, even for a designer, to "resell" a commercial design, and there are some damn good ones around for WP.
d) I'm making these points in an attempt to steer Tony towards WP as a starting point for getting into CMSs.
e) WP is a a blogging app (more than a CMS properly speaking), and clients more or less understand that, whereas 'CMS' is often Greek to them. And say "development environment" and their eyes will just glaze over.
f) When you're starting along this road, a "community" of users is really helpful - when you run up against an obstacle, the chances are someone else has already asked around and the answers are likely to be easyish to find, and if they aren't you can always ask someone. WP probably has the largest user community of all.
g) When you've got the hang of WP, Joomla (for example, to name a popular, easy-to-use CMS with a large community) will be easier. And after that, maybe Drupal (which as you (Corrosive) have pointed out, is more like a full-scale development environment).
g) I don't know MODx, it looks interesting and I've just downloaded it to play around with, but it's very new, i.e., a smallish community. And it says specifically to designers "If you can create a site mockup in HTML, CSS and JS, you're almost there to a fully-managed custom website, without having to know any PHP." Which is fine, but if your JS is really that good and you aren't just copying and pasting, you won't find a bit of PHP or MySQL hard to learn, so why not?
h) Cushy CMS is also new to me, but looks as if it has a number of drawbacks. For one thing, it is hosted, and in Australia, at that, not a good option for a UK client (Google is said to give preference to results on servers geographically closer to the user). You (Tony) could always try the free version just to see, but I think your time would be better spent otherwise.
i) Katedesign is quite right, though, if all you need is for your client to be able to change the news page, you don't need anything especially high-powered, and Drupal would be overkill. Which brings me back to WP.
PP