The state series Topo software is pretty good, less buggy than it used to be (though if you have a smartphone or pda type of GPS, their pockettopo product works but is still quite buggy).
Note that you can find their stuff online at a better price if you look around, I seem to recall $60 per state.
An alternative that I'm about to try is
memory-map.com, which uses GeoTiff and other open formats. From Topo you have to buy the maps from them. memory-map.com sells maps too, but you can also download them for free (with some effort ...) from libremap.org or seamless.usgs.gov, and if you travel overseas there are some options to get maps elsewhere in this fashion. There are other third-party sources you can buy maps from too, such as
http://www.edigitalmaps.com. Since I'm just starting down this route, I don't know how much harder/easier or better/worse it is.
You're definitely not imagining it, IMO it *is* a lot harder than it should be. Going with NG Topo is perhaps one of the *easiest* routes, though I think their shift to the whole Topo Explorer approach, while still also selling stuff that uses the old approach, is confusing, and I fear is ultimately not in the best interests of the consumer (how often does the government update the underlying data? Not often at all!). I'm pretty unhappy at the way the dropped their mapxchange process and sort of locked it away inside a process that now requires a person to install and run their explorer product. Maybe I make too big a deal of this, but it sure seems like a step backwards from this customer perspective --- I don't want any of the new stuff they're touting, and I don't like having the previous customer-created content wrapped up in that model. This is part of why I'm trying out a competitor.
The biggest advantage that I *think* Topo has, apart from exposure on a lot of store shelves, is that old mapxchange community where users would upload trail plots of a host of places for others to download and use. NG folks tell me that's still there if I install their explorer product and navigate through that; I've not managed to grit my teeth and do that yet. But it can be quite handy to get someone elses trace of a trail you plan to walk on.