but blimey, if I had just come across the DS interface for the first time, that would surely be more overwhelming than Blender!

This is true, and coming from Poser I had the same issue. However in Studio you can change layouts, and the one that made me feel more at home was setting the layout to City Limits. The default one is bleh.

Really? The default one was the only one I could halfway navigate. And STILL haven't figure out how to work the library yet.