I've heard very positive reviews of the latest FrontPage from people that HATE FrontPage.
As for VWD, I don't use it as I have VS 2008 Professional, but it's basically the same thing (albeit with extra bells and whistles). It rocks.
However, you do need to get used to the idea of "code behind" to get the most out of it. That's not hard though.
MS is far out in front of the crowd for development in this area. .NET truly is a huge departure from everything else and is the right direction. The basic way that you develop is a huge leap from the past as well (e.g. the Expression series). While it's still a work in progress, the direction is solid and you'll see in the future that others will need to immitate MS in order to make their tools as productive as the Visual Studio series.
Depending on your level of experience and needs, I'd say one of the best ways to make a web site now is to use VS with
DotNetNuke (a CMS). Build the extra functionality that you need into DNN, but don't reinvent the wheel. At the end of the day, you'll end up spending much less time screwing around building things that people have done 1000x already, and 1000x better than you could do yourself. However, there is a learning curve for DNN and for the first bit it WILL be frustrating. Once you get over it though, you're in the clear and on your way to super-fast RAD.
What people need to understand (and this is what MS really "gets"), is that development today is becoming so horribly complex that nobody can possibly keep up with it anymore, and the workload needs to be distributed amongst many people. VS is geared towards that. The Expression series is the next step in the evolution of development where the front end is abstracted away from the developer and given to the designer. i.e. The various 'domains' are becoming much more granular and niche than they were in the past.
Another way to put that is that the VS development methodology easily leads to more scalable development.
