Irfanview or something better?

I've been using Irfanview for ages for my image editing, touch-up's and manipulation needs. I like it, it's small, fast, easy to use, and seems to do everything I need with quality results.

However, I've now got myself a dSLR and would like to get more into post-image processing (when needed) and am wondering what packages other people are using and what for?

I know every man and his dog uses Photoshop, but ever since I tried to use it years ago, I didn't like the usability and it turned me off.

I mostly just resize, crop and touch up gamma/colour/saturation etc on JPEGs, so Irfanview with it's lossless JPEG processing plugins seem to work great. But I'm no expert, so I'd like to know if Irfanview is technically any good at this stuff compared to other packages?

Perhaps other higher end packages have better tools that I don't realise I'm missing with Irfanview?

Thanks
Dave