Gradient oddness in InDesign CS6

Question

I am trying to grasp the strangeness Adobe InDesign's gradient tool.
First, am I the only one who is constantly becoming frustrated that there is no consistancy between the tools in the Adobe line of products. Gradients are easy to accomplish in Illustrator and in Adobe Captivate 6 but then InDesign, not so easy. All I am trying to do is create an thick arrow where the top end is a light red and it smoothly transitions to a deeper red, at the bottom; a very simple task in any other tool I've used.
The problem?
The center marker is creating a bright spot so the gradient transistions from bright to a little brighter and then drops off to darker. Why is the center marker creating a bright spot? I don't see this behavior in the other Adobe products.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Thanks so much everyone. I really appreciate the awesome effort to assist me!
Unfortunately, I attempted a your ideas but the bright patch just moved to a new location. Incidently, if the transistion was changed to white -> black, the problem went away. Unfortunately (b/c of all your effort), I finally gave up and produced the arrow in Illustrator (worked perfectly).
Strangely, drag/drop to InDesign caused the Illustrator image to become fowled up (different problems) and I could not fit porportially to shape. Finally, I saved the Illustrator image as a PDF and Placed it into InDesign without further incident.
IMHO, there are too many inconsistancies in the Adobe Suite and differences in how same or similar tool sets work.
Thanks again everyone.