Don't look at this as "What's the best hammer to buy?" You are buying a result--clean accounting that will let you see your business in operation and figure out if your business is doing well or dying.
As others have said in this thread (and elsewhere) you should not be the person who does this. You are not competent. I don't care who you are. (Disclosure: I am a tax lawyer. I did my payroll tax returns exactly once before concluding I should not do this job.)
That means you need to hire someone. Solve your "What software should I buy?" question by instead asking "What software would allow me to hire competent, reliable bookkeepers efficiently, quickly, and cheaply?"
That's Quickbooks.
I use Quickbooks because it is trivially easy to hire a competent bookkeeper from Craigslist to keep things up to date.
If you use any other software you will have a harder time hiring a bookkeeper. You will then have to ensure that the bookkeeper is competent on the software you selected (who is going to judge this--you? Unlikely). You will probably have to pay more for this person.
All of the other vendors have nice products. But they are missing the boat on how to defeat Quickbooks.
Accounting requires a basic level of understanding, and it requires time. Both of those factors tell me that a business owner should not do his/her own accounting. Hiring an accountant/bookkeeper is essential to success.
An accounting software vendor should design software that is easy for an uncredentialled bookkeeper (i.e., not a CPA) to use. Then you'll have a zillion people at $25/hour willing to do bookkeeping for small businesses. That will make it less risky for a business owner to choose not-Quickbooks as the software to run the business on. That in turn will eat into the Quickbooks market share.
Don't focus on the end user (the small business owner). Focus on creating an extremely cheap service provider ecosystem to your end users.
I don't think you can sufficiently dumb down accounting software to allow a random business owner total safety in running his/her own books. There are too many edge cases in tax and accounting, and the random business owner does not have the radar to know whether he/she is an edge case or not, and what to do about it.
I don't do my own tax returns. I don't do my own accounting. I use Quickbooks on Windows (dedicated old PC for this in an office full of Macs) because Quickbooks on the Mac is shit. I sit down every other week with my bookkeeper and go over the last 2 weeks of activity line by line. Actually sitting down and looking at money in/money out has been The Most Important Thing I've Ever Done in the department of having a profitable business.