Buy CS4 as soon as it comes out - they've picked up the gradient interface from Photoshop as far as I can see from the online videos I've watched.

One way to make things a lot easier is to use global colors a lot. You can control things in the illustration more easily if you organize around them - yes it does mean more up front planning vs. free-form try it and see. It also will mean that if you edit the global color, any gradient using those colors will change too.

There are a lot of areas where Illustrator's interface is waaay behind Photoshop's...