Lost on the Floor

I have multiple problems that I am trying to wrap my head. I'm increasingly getting tired of Blogger, frequent outages, posts disappearing (or getting mangled), tedious template mods and the inability to quickly change a template/theme. I don't have to time I need to fool around the web trying to find a template I like and then taking the additional time to tweak the template and add back in all of the user modifications I've made. I'm a little bit of a design geek, but can't take the time I want to make my blog look like I really want it to, so I settle.

But on the other hand, I like Blogger as I have been using it for so long (not just here). I "trust" Google (about as far as I could throw them), but I realize that they're pretty stable (company-wise). I have my content here adn don't really want to have to shift it somewhere else (or lose it all together). And it's easy.

I want to spend more of my time writing rather than trying to cajole something into working order - I do enough of that at work. Anyone have any suggestions? Is Wordpress better than Blogger? Should I just leave well enough alone? Anyone have an idea how to fix my code so that the sidebar just doesn't run all the way down, but the central section is as long as the sidebar?

Thanks in advance.