Damaged, you are the first person I have ever heard say that MRTG was bad. The only thing I've ever heard negative about MRTG is that someone things that some other tool is better. And that may be. But MRTG has always been the just-works tool for the job IMO. Special requirements may drive the need for some other tool instead, but 95% of folks are well served by MRTG.
Granted, the config & index file stuff is annoying, but cfgmaker and indexmaker pretty much handle it for you as long as you're doing everyday stuff. If you have some routers and/or some managed switches and you want to get performance data / graphs out of 'em, MRTG is pretty simple to set up.