Editing the footage shouldn't give you any (noticable) loss in quality if your source format is DV and the destination DVD. If however your source is a lossy format such as MPEG, editing and therefore re-encoding will give a slight drop in quality but again this won't be noticable!
So, in sum, yes it seems like "cheap crummy software". Try the free trials offered by Ulead (
www.ulead.com) and Adobe to get an idea of what more expensive software can do!