Yeah, I'm not hot on those suggestions. Well, basically #2 was what I was suggesting for a single user accessing multiple accounts, although I don't access multiple GMail accounts that way. I simply have my GMail account, and I have about 10 email addresses from my various domains all going to my GMail account, and GMail makes it really easy to reply to messages and make it appear to come from the address it was sent to.

And yeah, the Google UI isn't the greatest, but I like it just fine. Frankly, I like it better than Thunderbird or Outlook.