I am in a similar boat to you, but just a little farther along. I did some CSS mapping, and made some not very good 1v1 maps and so on, and doing custom assets was always a PITA for me. I just got back into mapping, and I saw wallworm mentioned a few weeks back back, and I've been trying it out with some test maps and assets. It is the easiest way to work that I have come across, but some aspects aren't intuitive to begin with. Even with some strange quirks, I was able to go from model to game in only a few clicks as opposed to a mountain of clicks.
The workflow I have been using for the past week is modeling in blender, scaling and detailing in 3dsmax, and exporting with wall worm. Not extremely smooth, but better than what I was doing in CSS.
Welcome back to mapping!