I know how to physically unwrap it, that's the easy part. It's more like... it takes a long, long, long time to get results that look, at best, ok. I'm thinking about trying 3DS Max, it's supposed to have good tools for this kind of thing.
Tools a tool. You really aren't going to get different results using something else without knowing what your doing. In Blender depends on what you mean by it not looking good. You could set some lines to seams using Ctrl+E and Mark Seam so the unwrap considers it separate sections. From there you can use the pin function on certain UV points in the UV editor to lock them in place (like at say the corners) and then re-unwrap the mesh, which will obey the pinned point's locations.
That's off the top of my head though, as I'm not sitting in front of the desktop currently.
Turns out my problem was just that Blender unwraps UV's very poorly. Specifically, Blender just LOVES stretching circular islands into ovals. It'll also make one side of an island much larger than the other even though both are the same size on the model. It also shrinks one part of an island just to conserve angles which causes horrible distortion, much worse than if it just bent some of the triangles slightly. Fuck that shit, fixing those problems takes forever, and because I have to do it by hand, I've assuredly fucked up somewhere.
So I tried a stand-alone UV editor called UV Layout, and it's fantastic. It's basically exactly the same but without any stupid errors like random stretching or making the entire end of the island as large as one triangle on the other end.