Well, it's really your call, as you suspect we may be biased here - although many have used other CMS (drupal, joomla, etc) but have choosen silverstripe - I very much doubt you'll find it the other way around.

You can achieve your goals in many different ways. With silverstripe having a great MVC implementation it makes coding a very pleasant experience and whilst things are possible in more than one platform and more than one way within a platform - I do believe your code will be more effective and elegant within Silverstripe.

If you have an error with the tutorials, please report it and I am sure you will get help directly with that. With the articles and holder pages this might achieve all that you require.

In short yes it is a good option.

You are about to develop your own web application, Nick. This is not like downloading a browser and installing some plugins. SilverStripe(Sapphire) is a mighty and easy to learn tool for that. Furthermore, I totally agree with swaiba.

also with install problems...

you might try the way shown in the siverstripe demo video http://vimeo.com/16842606 on a windows machine with wamp, that's how I work locally

Well I started using SilverStripe three years ago knowing nothing about PHP. I found it a lot easier to wrap my head around then a lot of the competing products. Now pretty much every site I build is SS, and I've even been experimenting with using sapphire to help build out databases for iOS apps using Phone Gap.

There really is a lot of versatility in the system, even for total newbies, and actually my first site was a catalog site (And most of my sites are). I just took the eccommerce module, stripped out all cart related classes and just modified the the Product and ProductGroup ones.

Yes there's a learning curve, but you're going to have that with any system.

Good Luck