I'm a newbie here, but I like the vertex modeller. It's relatively stable and not TOOOOO difficult to use 8-) To practice in it, import a wavefront.obj file as vertex object, then select it and go to the modelling room. Try things like pulling on a vertex, selecting groups of polygons and deleting, linking one vertex to another, filling empty polygons, etc. You could try creating an object with a toroidal path in the spline modeller, then converting it to a vertex object in order to deform, increase polygon count, add thickness,etc. One of the bonuses is that you get good UV mapping when converting to a vertex object.