I am also a Nextgen user for the past 6 years. I experienced many of the same frustrations mentioned in this thread. Our solution was to design a new native iOS front end for nextgen that runs on the iPad. I have been using it for 6 months now. It resolves many of the data visualization issues and streamlines work flow. Currently, it works mostly to visualize the data in nextgen. I will start testing integrated dragon dictation this week. You can check it out on the app store: iConx.
(full disclosure- we developed this product, I usually don't post like this about iConx, but this thread really hit home as to why we developed it)