Yeah, Access is crap. I remember working with it when I was developing my first 'enterprise' applet and needed something quickly to back my servlet so I could write my DAO code. I actually thought it was 'a big chore' switching to MySQL, but once I did, I grew to really love it.
I've actually been doing some pure research and data mining apps over the last year that have really just left me in awe of the power of MySQL. I know Access has all the right acronyms, RDBMS ODBC etc, and it has been about 6 years since I used access- so its probably a lot better than I rmember it, but MySQL just plain rocks. I did 'recover and retire' (IE, inherit) a big app done against Postgres, but I don;t know enough about that to say much.
Anyway, all I'm sayin is I think you are really going to love MySQL.
Yeti