Welcome podgod!
You guys make it sound like the Helix is a pain in the you-know-what, ah ah!
I have my original Pod 2.0 and a PodXT. The XT makes me pretty happy still...
Well, it's more that dialing it in takes some time, but once you do it's like wow the sounds are amazing. I knew going into it there would be (and still is) a learning curve but it's a very powerful tool. Basically, the easiest way for me to look at it is to picture my real world pedalboard, then build it the same way in the Helix and that's what really opened my eyes to it.
It also has some decent tones out of the box that you can modify as well, just like the Pod XT and even to this day I maintain that thing still sounds fantastic, it's just a different toolset really.