I can relate to what you are talking about here. For the longest time, I hear drupal devs encourage cck use and discouraging writing node modules. I understood where they were coming from, but everytime I try to do anything very compledx with CCK, I seem to hit road blocks. I started a project at UNC Charlotte last year using CCK and quickly dumped that for a content node module. It really was a turning point for me and turned out to be the best decision. I was able to still leverage actions and workflows. Best part was I added custom actions in the custom module.

Ryan