More modern-trending, but anecdotally:
XPress has always been more difficult and frustrating to use than Adobe. I learned inDesign before I learned PageMaker, but iD and PM are very very similar overall tools.
In high school (~2004-2006) I produced a couple small zines, printed on a big copy machine at the office with inDesign.
inDesign is probably my favorite for that reason, and shortly thereafter when I went to college, I bought Adobe CS3 on student discount, and made sure I had a copy of inDesign.
On Windows, you can use Publisher as well, it's arguably not as good for high end use cases, but it should be fine for small zines and newsletters, especially something you're going to print yourself on an office laser printer.
Quark has been trying to make a Big Deal out of the fact that you can get XPress without a subscription, but Affinity is likely a better or easier buy if you have a Mac. It appears that Quark is trying to get people on a sort of part-subscription plan where you buy up a couple years worth of major version upgrades in advance, but the base product at the time you buy is still perpetually licensed. Entry on that is $295, which isn't that bad if that's the kind of program you need.
My impression is that is been downhill since Pages '09.
I wouldn't put it this way at all. Granted, to be honest, Pages has never really been a great format to use if you intend to keep a set of documents around long-term. Microsoft's own formats are "way" better for that, but plain text or RTF or exporting everything to PDF or postscript for read-only archival is your best strategy there.
Apple simplified iWork a lot post '09. Mostly the same thing that happened in that same general era as Final Cut and I believe Logic, and OS X Server. The impression I get is that it's still quality software, but they took some of the power user buttons out. Given that it's been, you know,
ten years, I'd imagine most of that stuff is back, albeit, rearranged a bit.
Anyway, Automator or AppleScript might have a way to bulk convert documents to newer file formats or to something better suited for archival.
Disclaimer: I've never been a daily user of Pages, except in the early 2010s when I was using an iPad on the regular, before Office for iPad shipped. If you power-use office software, Microsoft Office is the place to be, arguably even on a Mac.
There is no data merge / mail merge, for example. That, to me, is a biggie. I look and think that I think that feature started in PageMaker 6 or 6.5 and those came out in the nineties, so twenty years later, that sort of thing should almost be a standard feature by now.
I didn't realize PageMaker had that. I would've expected that to be in the Frame(maker) realm.
Microsoft Publisher has it, although it's kind of an obvious thing there from the mail merge and office automation perspective.
