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I too played with GIS tools, and found myself getting lost in a lot of file formats I didn't understand. I tried QGIS too, and for GUI apps it seemed like the best bet (I was going to recommend it when I read the thread title). I get the feeling that the grass and other "back end" GIS software is amazingly powerful, but totally beyond what would even need, or fully understand.
If all you want to do is plot shapes by hand, you might do better by using Inkscape or a similar vector graphic application. Inkscape uses the SVG format, which is an XML-based thing which should be fairly easy to generate programatically, if you're into coding a generator yourself.
Another option is gnuplot, although I think it's a long shot. I vaguely recall a map plotting gnuplot example.
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