iTunes is crap:

1. To change titles, albums and genres, you have to do so one track at a time.
2. Say you have an iPod mini (4GB), and you have 10GB of music in your itunes library. To transfer 4GB of songs to your ipod, you need to delete 6GB from your library. Also, if you use itunes to play music on the PC, you need to re-add the 6GB of tracks to the library.
3. Playlists are gay. You make a playlist for the best songs of each artist, but when you remove the tracks from itunes library (to update your ipod), they also get removed from the playlist.

What im saying is:

Is there an application out there that is better than itunes and compatible with my ipod? If not, do Creative/other-brand mp3 players come with better software?

Welcome to the wonders of DRM and Apple.

Due to the fact that all the software has Digital Rights Management built in (AAC), it is impossible for anyone else to write software to manipulate these files. Since DRM is a type of encryption, it is illegal to reverse engineer the format so that other people can make software for it. Since it's DRM'd, it's illegal to convert it into another file format without all these retarded restrictions (like MP3 or freakin' wav).

Thus, you're stuck using only Apple software on only Apple hardware using only songs you bought from Apple.

However, realisitically, there are illegal pieces of software out there that may do what you want. And Apple may have licensed out their format and let other people make stuff, but that'll be expensive probably. Here's some.

http://www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod/

I bought anapod ages ago when iTunes was failing to sync tracks. It works, but it doesnt play tracks.

Can't you just dump stuff on your iPod with explorer? Did you buy stuff from the music store or is it just your music files you listen to with iTunes?.
I use Foobar2000 as my music player, and I believe there's a plugin called foo_pod for use of your iPod with it, but since I don't have an iPod I don't know wether it does what you want.
Personally, I listen to music on my phone. It's only 500 MB storage but when you load new stuff on it from time to time it's enough.

Yo derf, figured it out already?

I havent touched my music for a while now, but i spoke to some people that use iTunes, and they say that infact i can do things i thought i couldnt do. They referred to things like shift-click, which is in the manual. I thought that was pretty pathetic for Apple to make unintuitive PC software for things as simple as changing album names on multiple tracks.

Next time, ill use iTunes and try these things, but if i get no joy - ill go back to anapod and try to get foobar on there.