I'd suggest getting to one good slide. One slide with a beautiful font, one line of text and a complementary background image/color. This template is already 90% the work of making the presentation aesthetically pleasing. And take it from there.

What is the problem with beamer?

I think Beamer is great for things like lecture slides and other presentation where the aim is to pass on dense amounts of information. When using slides to illustrate rather than summarise, however, it requires a series of hacks to position, resize, add custom colours and images or fonts. It also gives you standard elements that you probably don't want in these illustrative slides, such as the slide number, author and subtitle on the footer of each slide.

Hmm.... I'm not sure I understand this thread, then. Do you view the predominant advice of this article as really only relevant for somewhat "informal" talks? Because, pretty much every presentation I've ever had to give was fairly dense in information.

(Also, I think if you are just doing an image for the whole slide, that isn't too tough in beamer. Just switch to the default theme and don't provide a title for the slide. Right?)