I keep hearing about people having problems learning how to use Pages. I assume that is because they usually had been trained on Word. I rarely ever use Pages as a word processor, nor did I ever touch Word. Just watching others use it was frightening! But that may have been because most of those people never learned that there was a way to have less than 1,362 items in the navigation/work/whatever that huge waste of space at the top of every page is called.
And, as I said before, I grew up using FileMaker as a page layout app. Naturally, I also used it instead of a spreadsheet. I saw enough of those things when I earned (however marginally) my bachelors degree. Fortunately, I only had one job that even hinted at the need for my accounting skills and it was only for about six months! So, when I eventually needed a spreadsheet I was able to make it look anyway I wanted and still had no use for multitudes of columns and rows; just show me the 'facts' from the database, using the formulas I developed and make it as beautiful as I could. No thinks, of course, to Excel, since I never touched that app, either.
Since there was soon to be a Mac and real typography soon followed, I moved from a dot matrix to PDF at 300ppi! All with MacWrite, of course.
When my wife became a State Officer in DAR, in was painfully obvious that index cards were beyond their league for 6,000+ state members. Fortunately, I was fairly experienced in FM and it ran on both Macs and Windows, so transferring the database every three years made it an obvious choice. But things became more difficult when it came to writing a guide to using the database for barely computer literate users! Now, I needed a page layout app! And that's when I started using FM also as a page layout program! I already knew how to put things on a virtual page with pixel precision because that the way FM worked!
I suppose that's why I naturally went to the layout functions of Pages rather than the word processing methods. Why bother moving/adjusting margins, columns, gutters, etc. when one could simply draw a rectangle on the 'page'. And, before they crippled it for a while, any text box could bleed into any other box with two simple clicks! Across columns or across pages! Of course, an odd shaped image could be made to stop a line of text at whatever minimum distance you might want from the image.
So, I am thankful I never was 'spoiled' by any of the "big guys" and their 'everything-
including-the-kitchen-sink' and ridiculously expensive apps. Especially when the Mac versions were usually months, if not years late with updates and even then usually not as full featured as the Windows models. In other words, I didn't have any un-learning to do. Nor did I have to try to make Pages do that some other app did, but with completely different steps. My wife and I have dealt with national organizations and computer illiterate folks swapping Word docs numerous times with nary a problem. I'm sure others have had different experiences. But there's nothing I can do about that. Use what works best for you. I hope you actually enjoy using those apps as much as I do using Pages and Numbers.
