Well, 5 hours is a good deal longer than it ought to take you to get BookDesigner ticking for you. That being said, I did give up about 4 different times myself, before I got it where I wanted it.
The secret is to get the basic settings where you want them, and then just press the buttons.
If you don't care about Tables of Contents and such, you can mostly ignore the title/subtitles business, and just run it through the creation routine. I do like to use the element browser to quickly check for things that BD thinks are titles or subtitles which aren't (one word exclamations like "ARRRRRGGGGHHH!" tend to get read that way), but I really don't do anything other than that and adding cover art to the books I put through it. I've mostly put Baen titles through it myself.
