Have you considered Zenphoto ( http://www.zenphoto.org/ ) or Pixelpost ( www.pixelpost.org )?

  I would add this that the on-page and white hat SEO is the one can help you! Don't use black hat SEO.

If you're looking for a full-featured Content Management System, where all parts of your site (galleries, blog, catalog/store, etc.) are fully integrated, you're going to have to put up with a fair amount of complexity. That's the nature of a general-purpose CMS. If you found Joomla to be difficult, you'll probably find Drupal to be even harder. Wordpress might be a bit simpler, and is very popular. There are other CMSs, but I'm not familiar with them. Perhaps you could look around at other sites that are similar to what you're aiming for, and look under the covers to see if they use a CMS?

The alternative is to build up your site from bits and pieces -- a photo gallery here, a blog there, a store from somewhere else, and tie it all together with your handwritten landing page. The individual pieces might be easier to deal with than a full CMS, but it will never be fully integrated. For example, jumping out of the blog to go to the gallery might lose your session (signon) in the blog. Plus, appearances will never quite match up. If you want a truly integrated look and feel to your site, a CMS is probably the way to go -- you're just going to have to bite the bullet and learn how to build it. Rather than picking a CMS first, I would look for other sites and see what they use -- both the base CMS and add-ons for blog, gallery, etc.

The only thing I hate about Joomla is the poor security and for someone without medium experience with how it works, how it can be secured and maintained up to date Joomla may turn into a nightmare. Since it's more secure I'd vote for Wordpress. With all the plugins and themes nowadays available you can make Wordpress which is actually a blogging platform into everything you need, photo gallery, forum, online store you name it.