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Personally, I'd be lost without HL these days. I rarely play - I almost always GM for our group, and I use HL constantly, both in preparation and during the game.
In preparation - well, nothing beats either fast creation of NPCs or modification of monsters, or just the straight import and then modification of existing NPCs (such as all the ones in the GMG).
In play - yeah, the Tac Console can be a bit daunting at first, but once you've gotten used to it, it makes life so much easier. I suggest getting your group together for some "training sessions". Whip up some characters and just run them through combat after combat using the Tac Console in order to get used to it. It won't take that long (and it's a bit of fun on a rainy Sunday when nobody can be bothered running a full game session).
Once you have the individual portfolios created, you can import them into another portfolio called "Group" or "Party", and use that for the game itself, keeping track of treasure, XP, etc. There's even a journal section to enter the game dates and real-world dates of encounters and the like. You can then export the characters to individual files again for each player (assuming they have HL themselves).
In my group, the players that don't live at my house (my wife and son play, as well as friends) have HL, so on character creation I simply put together a portfolio at its most base level, which includes the number of points for ability scores, and what additional resources we'll be using (such as expansions, etc). I email this .por file to the player, who then uses it to create their character according the rules for the campaign.
Seriously, I don't think I could go back to "traditional" tabletop GMing! It would just take up too much time!
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