working with professional? wordpress templates

Hi,

I am considering buying an off the shelf pro designed template, but have been put off a little after struggling with the free templates in wordpress. i have worked with several html website editors and templates in the past such as adobe with a fair degree of success but have found the wordpress approach very difficult indeed. I don’t have a great deal of expertise in coding but can wing it by using wsyiwyg, cutting and pasting or replacing bits of html code until i get roughly what i want. but as i say I find this near on impossible to do in wordpress.
So I suppose the bottom line is are these paid for wordpress themes easier to customize than the free ones. I don’t want to waste money downloading one only to find out that its no good.

anyone been down this road before?

Many thanks.