Suggest an upgrade other than Aperture?

Question

I am currently using a trial version of Aperture. And, I was expecting a bit more similarity between Aperture and iPhoto, but with some customizing capabilities.
I have many children's albums to do, and I don't feel like any of the options of Aperture really work that well. Snapshots is the only one.... then, no variety.
Journal works good to put lots of photos on, being able to have a map on a page, and a default text section. But, for a kid, the background colors seem a bit grown up. And, it appears there is no way to get rid of the white frame around each page (which makes the space for photo placement smaller)?
I like the speed that templates provide, but sometimes the lack of customizing is frustrating... I have gone to a different dummy album to be able to do a different format from a different theme, "printing to iPhoto" so I can then import that jpeg into the album I am working on.
Anyhow, I have heard of InDesign, but as I see it is like $600 or something like that. I was looking for $200 or less. Any suggestions out there, or maybe I am missing something in Aperture???

Answer 1

The end product for the most part is albums (books). And I have been happy with my product through iPhoto. But at times I feel like I miss some features that I think would be beneficial. Such as:
Seeing the event title for the pictures I am working on. Ie my event titles sometimes are where my description is. I put further detail of why I took the photo or if there is extra info for just that shot. Which I think falls into the file management a little but rather how the book program displays or uses the data attached to the photo.
More importantly, I have had a desire to make some photos larger or others smaller or add one more photo or have to work around landscape vs portrait within the static templates. That is where I thought aperture would come to the rescue. But, the themes are barely similar to iPhoto. And the ones that are similar have had the map option removed from the theme or the background colors aren't widespread enough on the one or two themes that fit for a child's growing up album or family album, So, because it appears that aperture isn't going to be able to provide the full customization I was looking for, I feel like I am at square one in finding really only an improvement to iPhoto and would ideally still like to have apple continue to process my books for consistency.