IDCS Hyphenation for justified columns sucks

Sucks is a strong word I know.

I have been using InDesign for 18 months or so — as a Quark refugee, I'm really enjoying it. I wouldn't go back — BUT have yet to find a respectable hyphenation/justification setting for justified columns.

I have not yet come across any forum messages that address this. Dave Saunders, in one of the permanent issues, more or less recommends trusting (or abrogating) to the composer tendencies. Unfortunately no matter what I do with the settings — even applying some horizontal compression to the body font, justification results are much better in Quark. (Treason? True though.)

The problem: there should be more hyphenation (I have even set the hyphenation spacing bar all the way to the left, and word break options at an extreme), and words that really should be hyphenated are refused hyphenation. This is OK if I could personally attend to every line but what I need is a good compromise that takes care of itself. What I've got instead — and as far as I know, my designer friends too — are justified columns that just LOOK GAPPY. Not good. What gives?

As I am designing a newspaper and have chosen to do the dummy in InDesign I have now come hard up to this issue. Very unhappy. None of my InDesign friends have been able to suggest a solution. They have the same problem — therefore lots of ragged settings. I have rung the Support people who, (i) hadn't heard of any such problem before, and (ii) after consulting with their screen, put me on to an ICDS update which I downloaded. (Adobe InDesign CS 3.0.1 (August 2004 update) - InDesign for Macintosh - Downloads) Honestly, I can't tell if there is any improvement.

Anybody out there have any clues? It would be greatly appreciated.

Chong