hard to use and no support for the free version

I’ve been trying to fix a problem with S2Member for over a week. I went to the Forum for the free version, posted my problem, and didn’t get any assistance, though the developers say the Forums are definitely responsive when you have a question or problem. Basically, when my members pay for restricted pages, they only get the unrestricted pages. I’ve spent hours reading about S2Member and watching videos, which I’ll need to continue doing until I find an answer because there’s not adequate support for the free version of S2Member. I’ve set it up according to the reams of instructions I’ve read, but it doesn’t work. The developers may feel that providing hours of instructions is support, but if their product needs that much instruction, maybe it could be presented in a more straight-forward way. I’ve set up other plug-ins, and had no problems, but S2Member is frustrating and very stressful.