Adjust, I'm guessing you're talking about an old version of InDesign? You didn't say which version you were referring to in your list.
The latest version, CS5.5 (released April 2011) does support nested styles (that is, it correctly applies character styles within them). It does a much better job of supporting floats/text wraps .. e.g. drop caps work now ... but I agree, still needs work.
CS5.5 makes it much easier than previous versions to control what content gets exported and in what order, if you use the new Articles panel. It has a fast and intuitive way to add custom alt tags to images. It lets you select any object or group and have it rasterize on export (per the custom settings you want) while still maintaining that completely editable in the ID file. You can insert page breaks before/after elements. You can map paragraph and character styles to CSS tags, which is a slick workflow if you have an external CSS that you link to ... great for when you're doing a series of similar books.
Yes there is room for improvement! Definitely. But I'd rather use the export to EPUB controls in ID CS5.5 than the ones in Acrobat or Word ... oh wait, they don't have an export to EPUB command.
Newbies to the field should realize that pros were creating EPUBs and MOBIs (Kindle ebooks) long before professional publishers (who use InDesign) got into it, so they have developed very good workflows that don't involve InDesign.
Ideally you format your book as a well-designed web site with formatting controlled by CSS, using the tags and markup allowed by the EPUB 2.x spec.
But if you're starting with an InDesign file, or a Word file and you're familiar w/ID and own it already, use that instead (pour the Word doc into ID). But you will very likely still need to crack open the EPUB and edit "the web site within" to some degree.
AM