Well, for basic beginners usage I personally would strongly suggest Eclipse: if used properly, it creates clean project templates and builds an archive which simply works ;-). But it can also cause a lot of "fun", because the WTP team time by time manages to add really nasty bugs...
And using Eclipse (or another IDE) could probably reduce the number of "strange xml validation error on deployment" in this forum to zero ;-).
Anywell, the best tool will fail the "reality test" - users manage to break everything ;-)..
Wolfgang