My two pence –
MSP probably sounds about right for what you need it for.
I find it is a terrible tool for communication, not bad for a pm to plan and to run various scenarios and see impacts if you have all your dependancies right but that's it.
Personally I haven't bothered with a formal project tool for a year or so of running pretty large projects (£1m) and I don't feel the projects have suffered
Best feedback I had recently to do with planning was when me & my team were parachuted into a project which need a webapp built in 3 weeks, as a team we created a project plan/timeline on the whiteboard and then as every day went by we crossed it off in the daily standups. Worked really well to focus everyone on what they needed to do.
Depending on how professional your org / people are I find the main challenge isn't creating a plan, but getting people to buy into it. If they don't buy into it doesn't matter what dates you put down, they won't do it. Creating the plan in conjunction with the guys who will do the work (or even asking them to do it for you) seems to be the best way of achieving a realistic and doable plan imo
So for me – whiteboard, marker pens, lots of postit notes. Do some googling on Agile project management, kanban charts for some 'different' ideas to using MSP