Service Activities or Appointments?

So I have a social service case tracking system with the Case entity as our main focus.  I want to be able to create appointments related to the Case.  

I've tried Service Activities, and have these issues:

1. You have to explicitly select the Case from the Service Activity --- you can't launch one from the Case and have it auto-populate.
2. The UI is terribly confusing to the end user.  
3. They don't synch with Outlook, so the Service Calendar is mutually exclusive from the Resources involved's personal Outlook calendar.  
4. Nowhere from the perspective of the Case do you see this scheduling event.

I've tried Appointments and have these issues:

1. Apparently, they synch with Outlook, but I don't see any case references within the body.  I also don't have the Outlook plug-in or have configured synchronization so am not sure how this works.
2. There doesn't seem to be a way to see a "schedule" of availability when scheduling the appointment.

I'm really struggling with an option that closely approximates the ability to schedule an appointment related to a Case with deference to the Resource's calendar availability.