You shouldn't need to go for a developmental version as 1.4.6 works well and using developmental software can give you more problems.
What is the specific problem you are encountering? What is "unnecessarily complicated"?
Also, when you say "The edit text box doesn't seem to always hold "saved" changes", what is the "edit text box" and what do you mean by "saved changes"?
It may well be that the documentation you have read isn't explaining things well enough and there is a simple way of doing what you want.