It's almost always a mistake to hand over the same admin interface you get in drupal to your clients. We solve this by building one for them. A couple of views here and there (with bulk ops), and panels with rules for fine tuning and you can almost always create a simple enough admin interface for them. Alternatively, you can write up a small module just for that purpuse to have full control of it. Use Beans in stead of raw blocks, use Entityforms instead of Webforms so that you can easily setup prebuilt UI facing forms and Organic Groups is almost often good enough to fine tune permissions across multiple roles. Use Nodequeue for things like slideshow management. I find that with Drupal, if you don't have a final idea in mind before you begin, it'll almost always be clunky, but conversly, with a solid plan, it's a trivial matter of knowing your modules.