you are absolutely right about the quality of those progs, i have the same experience, especially when you work with scanned images. 
an other option could be making a screen shot from the houses we have and use the bitmap or a combination of bitmaps. this would save a lot of work and from screenshots you can combine whatever you want.
the best thing is to look what we might need when the main scene  is more or less set..

"The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming train"