Unfortunately things that take 5 minutes in a complex application typically required an order of magnitude larger investment up front in manual reading and experience.

I deal with Postgres a good bit, but will be the first to tell you that pgAdmin has got some issues. It's a very clunky, buggy, moody piece of software.

I've had better luck learning how to use the psql command/shell than mess with pgAdmin, at least in certain cases. To take your example of displaying tables, psql in and type: \dt

The rest is just a search away.

I have idle daydreams where Sequel Pro is finally ported to Postgres. pgAdmin is horrendous.

That would be amazing. Sequel Pro makes MySQL management so easy. Have you emailed the author asking for that feature?

Edit: It seems they are working on it but I i'm not sure when we can expect a release: http://stuconnolly.com/blog/sequel-pro-postgresql-support/

I've used Sequel Pro and I don't understand why others love it; it's as clunky as anything I've ever used. My preference is for SQLyog - and my dream is that to be ported to OSX...

That article is from September of 2012.

I have always stated postgres would become much more widely adopted if it was released on RDS and.... they finish the sequel pro support. Half way there ;)

Can you elaborate further?

Coming from a MySQL background, I sort-of assumed PostgreSQL worked the same way. I remember after setting up the server, pgAdmin was very difficult to navigate. I managed to get a database and table made and got some data in (using SQL) but I couldn't view any of the data. Compared to MySQL + Sequel Pro it was very difficult to use for a beginner.

Postgres is very powerful and can do a lot. I think I just need a good tutorial and some time to get used to it.

None of that has anything to do with postgresql. Pgadmin is crappy, don't use it. Use one of the dozens of database independent admin tools, or just stick with the best tool: psql.