Jed is somewhat hard to pick up at first, but it gets a LOT easier with time and practice (especially if you go through the tutorials and learn the tricks for doing things quickly)
The thing is, JKEdit is very intuitive and pretty. It's got a shallow learning curve that makes it super easy to learn. But once you try to go beyond the basics, you'll find it literally impossible to cleave things exactly how you want them. I spent a good part of 5 or more years mastering JKEdit, I even figured out how to get past the "demo version" limits before the full version was released. But I always hit a BIG wall, if you ever want to cut a sector in a very specific way, you'll have a hard time getting the grid to line up exactly where you want it. It has a limited number of grid sizes/positions you can use and if what you want doesn't fall into that, you're out of luck unless you want to move each vertex manually (which is a bigger pain than editing in JED, cause JED lets you drag and drop verticies :P)
Unlike JKEdit's grids, you can set JEDs grid to any size you want using a decimal "grid size" value. Also, you can even change the grids position and orientation so that it fits perfectly where you want it. The fact is, JKEdit is so easy to learn because it doesn't let you do complex things. Try out the JED tutorials
http://massassi.net/tutorials.php (start with one of the "basics" tutorials. Look at
http://massassi.net/tutorials/levelhelper/levelhelper.html also try looking at the "Jed Tutor" offline tutorial, I've never gone through that one, but it's description sounds like it's got the basics in it) Then go through the other tutorials, if something seems too hard, save it for later. Chances are, one of the other tutorials will teach you what you need to know for the ones you skip.