I voted for CIS 5.3 over the NIS, NIS looks great from a GUI point of view, and has good detection rate but I feel prevention is better than the cure to be honest. I do agree that when HIPS comes up it can be confusing for some, but that rarely pops up unless switched to paranoid. It would be nice for it (DEF + alerts) when they do come up, to be more newbie friendly.... (is okay for me, but for the ultimate non-savvy they need it spelt out) and I'm sure this will happen as with every new release of CIS it's getting better all the time, you can really see how better the sandbox is coming along since it was first introduced, it's getting a more rounded/matured product and doing the job it's meant to do.
Although the AV part of CIS is ranked among the best, it still needs more work on it to compare to the likes of Symantec, but to be honest in my opinion that's all they got going for them.