Your mistake was to fight the process, which would indeed have resulted in frustration.
I have to agree here also! If you work with the system rather than fighting it you'll have a much better experience. Mute point now for Darrin though, as long as you're happy with what you've got, I guess it's all good
Odd point though, as I've neve had any problem just dropping a video file into iTunes and it automatically converting for use on my iPhone (if it needed to be converted, a little conversion progress bar would pop up)...