I'm trying to build a simple diagramming application using WPF, and I'm running into some major hurdles. 

The application is very basic. I have a canvas element, and set of basic shapes-ellipse, rectangle etc. Users will choose a shape and click to place them on the canvas. Afterwards, the app will export the data into xml.

The code to place shapes was straight forward, however I'm at the point where I want to add extra functionality, like resizing, moving, and rotating the shapes. I know this is all done with Render/Layout transforms. To speed things up, I used sliders to control the various parameters, but I'm going to switch to (adorners+thumbs?) so the interface is more intuitive.

All the examples I've seen show just massive amounts of code to get these types of features working.

However the code base is only a few days old, but it's already a pain to maintain, which means I totally took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Is WPF the proper tool to build the application that I want, or should I look at a different set of tools.