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Carlton
I highly recommend you start looking at capturing flats. Flats, darks and bias frames can be used often over various imaginf sessions and dont need to be taken each time usually. If you are taking apart the imaging train exposing imaging sensor and lens elements to the air they quickly pickup dust that shows up in your image. But apart from that all images have some degree of darkening in the corners as less photons reach those corners of the sensor so its advantageous to have flats to compensate. It makes a bigger improvement to end end result than darks or bias plus having a flat even brightness across the shot lets you build up better mosaics of frames to a wider image.
PixInsight is difficult to learn due to the terminology and that its basically a "desktop" with tons of tools in the menus, its unhelpful to know where to start. As Ivo mentioned its a "linear workflow", meaning you start with using one thing, then run something else, then something else. What these things are are entirely up to you, the software does not guide you along in anyway. PI can be run in demo mode and if you go to the light vortex tutotials online and follow their proposed PI workflow that will get you from your captured subs to a nice image. The are easy enough to follow, they try to explain the Why as well. I highly suggest you take a full set of lights darks flats and bias frames first. dozens of each at least then go through the LVA PI workflow, just follow it as it stands and see what you end up with and how it felt to do. PI is actually easy to use, the hardness is understanding what is going on with each tool. Others may tell you to only start withPI's BatchPreProcessing script which is basically a one click version of that workflow but it wont teach you anything and it uses technically less accurate settings to accomodate the hands off approach. But go through the LVA workflow a couple of times and see how it feels, maybe take it down as your own notes as you go so you can understand and repeat it with other data.
You just may not find PI is for you right now, thats fine, just experience it for yourself to find out. You may also have a look at AstroPixelProcessor, its both simple and powerful and I think is a good progression from DSS towards PI. Its approach is familar to DSS and PI and has good power and fits nicely between the two. But check your capture format is supported first.
I'm honestly not sure where ST fits in to the panetheon of AP Software, it seems its own thing to just clean up an integrated image. Its such a difference approach its not easy to really compare and maybe it cant. Analogy: you need to travel from Sydney to Melbourne. You could take car, train, ship or plane. They achieve the same end result but are meaningless to compare for this purpose alone. But the choice of holden or ford for the car has meaning. Here I see DSS as maybe ford, PI as holden and ST as maybe a ship... they all get you from A to B but so radically different a good comparision is not suitable.
Its too subjective. for MYSELF only I like APP and PI and find ST difficult to understand what I need to do. For others it will be different again. For yourself its likely you will differ from me but I think experiencing tthem yourself is the only way you'll make the right decision especially when understanding others advice on the products.
For myself, I regret buying AstroArt and Nebulosity. I don't regret buying StarTools. And I think AstroPixelProcessor and PixInsight were money well spent. I have one or two other commercial packages as well but they will be in my regret pile as I can't even remember them and certaintly dont have them currently installed.
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