I feel ya. When I first started working with the Graph Editor to do this animation, I thought "no way, this is too tedious". Now, I like it better than the graph editor in Lightwave. But that's just me, I always end up liking whatever I know the best, and my knowledge of editing curves in Poser has outstripped my knowledge of Lightwave. Not that that is saying much...

Still, I did win the "best use of PhotoInside technology" category of hdgreetings Winter Holidays Animation Contest with this (with extensive use of Graph Editor):

Bottom line: dive in, you will get used to it. One of the handiest thing I found was the ability to drag select parts of curves, and hold ctrl to shift values up/down, or just drag to shift left/right.
Also nice is the retime animation feature. I had to use the hell out of that when I discovered, after the thing was done, that I was in the wrong frame rate :(
Don't neglect the animation pallete either, good for big changes and retiming, too. 
Just know this: animation layers do not work, don't bother with them (be satisfied with everything on one layer).

P.S. I will be smoothing out the jerkiness and mistiming of that animation before next holiday season, I had to rush it in. Though flawed, it turned out to be very popular...after all, it's only an ecard, not a major motion picture, heh heh.