My advice for iOS in particular is to not fight the tools. I took a dislike to Interface Builder back when it was a separate program and only recently have I actually started using it to build interfaces and in retrospect it would have saved me a lot of time. The follies of youth!
Fighting the tools is like hating a place you just moved to. No matter what you do, you will never feel at home and miss out on all the experiences of being a local.
