[noob again]objects and properties and messages

[Mikey]

Pat, Dan, Richard, et. al,
The thing that got me on this topic was a little project that I'm
trying to build in RR which involves, at this point just two objects: 
A field, and a tab panel/button/whatever.

Completely by accident I discover the tabStop property for fields, and
shread a bunch of code from the field, cursing the whole time that the
tabStop property isn't listed on the Properties palette for fields,
(at least as far as I could see).

Then I start playing with the Tab Panel for navigating between cards,
only to discover that there are apparently a bunch of messages that
tab panels can receive that other types of buttons do not.  OK, what
are these?  Well, there doesn't appear to be a list anywhere.  More
frustration.

To this point noob is questioning if he should continue development on
this project in other environments that he knows better since the
investment of time in learning RR in the present manner appears to be
excessively time consuming since at present there is only one way to
learn it, and that is by surprise.

As long as I'm on the topic of bitching and expelling frustration, is
there anybody else that finds the way that backgrounds are handled
awkward and difficult?

I mean c'mon!  I wrote HyperGuard, the XCMD that squashed the Dukakis
trojan, in a single stinking afternoon, and I can't get a tab whatever
to function as I expect or complete a simple text parser?  I know
there's a learning curve, but this is getting silly.  After looking at
the options, I'm clearly in the Pro tool realm, but I'm not going to
plink down $1,000 for the pro tool if this is where things are going. 
I think I've been pretty patient to this point but the last four days
have been increasingly annoying.

-- 
On the first day, God created the heavens and the Earth
On the second day, God created the oceans.
On the third day, God put the animals on hold for a few hours,
   and did a little diving.
And God said, "This is good."