I hear you, I'm facing the same issue.  I've downloaded the skinning guide and gone through it but I haven't had an "aha" moment.  Wordpress Skinning is much more straight forward; at least it appears to be so.  There's also a great deal of free high quality instructional/tutorial materials for Wordpress compared to DNN, including skins, plug-ins and extensions.  It's easier to get stuff to work as well.  I've been wrestling all week with the DNN open source blogging module and have yet to get it to work on DNN 6.  It tells me it's installed correctly and looks like it's there but it simply doesn't work.  I've had a good experience with Disqus which is also a .NET app but I don't think I can use it with DNN.  There are reasons I'd like to get DNN working but it does have a fairly steep learning curve.