SharePoint Designer is the way to go. It gives you a great deal of functionality
regarding workflows for free.
And don't worry about "developer vagueness." If it doesn't meet your business
needs and/or can't be described in business language, it'll be useless to you
and your users anyway. :)
Another tool I've heard great things about (and I have NO affiliation with them
whatsoever... haven't even seen it in action) is Nintex Workflow. Standard
edition is somewhere just under US$9K; Enterprise is ~US$17K. It's a no-code
solution which allows you to visualize the workflow process (very similar to
what you would see in Visio) and it creates all the code for you.
And if/when you upgrade to SP2010, Visio itself has been purported to be a great
workflow builder that integrates right into SharePoint. (The demos sure look
exciting anyway!)
All that said, SharePoint Designer workflows are perhaps less intuitive than the
Nintex/Visio options, but at a pricetag of $0, it's worth taking a look.