How to safely and successfully use Bootcamp?
I've never run into any issues like that using Bootcamp. Bootcamp allows you to natively boot into Windows instead of OSX, so it gets all of your resources. All the processor cores, all the RAM, and the entire graphics card. The only decision you have to make is how big your partition has to be for Windows.

How much space you assign to Windows depends on how much stuff you plan on putting in your Windows installation. Windows 7 itself takes close to 16 GB of hard drive space. You'll want plenty more for game installations, Windows Updates, and other things.

Unfortunately this decision has to be made upfront, and changing the size later down the road isn't straight forward (though possible). You can repartition the drive, but the Windows NTFS partition is not going to expand to use the unallocated disk space. That usually requires booting into another linux OS and extending the partition. This in itself has always been somewhat risky. If you do end up having to resize partitions, backup both OSX and Windows completely.

I've had little to no problems using Bootcamp. Perhaps it's matured more since you last used it. The only problem I run into is Windows will only ever see the discrete GPU, so the battery doesn't last terribly long.