You should always ask yourself, do you really need Magento in the first place? It's built to cater for everything, so by definition is seriously heavy weight. Needs at least a VPS in my opinion - have tried it on shared hosting and that's simply a no go.
It is flexible if you know what you're doing. If you don't, it's more of a hinderance than anything else.
Personally, I;ve learn the basics so I can update sites and maintain several Magento sites I've inherited, but the amount of questions the admin area alone generates from clients is stupid.
Magento is made for developers by developers, which is fine if you're a developer. Their developers forgot that normal, none technical people would be using the admin area.