Your story echoes mine. It is a lot of work to get a dobsonian out and when you can only find the same 5 targets, you start to think it was a waste of money. I literally only saw the moon, saturn, jupiter, mars, pleaides and M42 Orion nebula. I mean we had some spectacular views (ice caps on mars!) but it hardly justified the purchase and I felt bad about it.
Anyway,
this Cloudy Nights thread totally changed astronomy for me. The first night of trying this method I found 8 Messier objects. With a bit more practice, I can reliably get any object in the sky into the viewfinder. I'm starting to recognise constellations more.
Now I don't mind the effort of getting the 'scope out and collimating because I will actually be able to find things!
The setup cost me $3 at officeworks to print the degree circles for the base, and about $35 to get the digital Wixey angle gauge from Amazon.
Best of luck!
(I just noticed degree circles were mentioned above. Not sure how the IIS method compares, probably much the same! Take a look at both)