I've tried Cheerio as well, but I prefer JSDOM since it exposes the DOM APIs. What I'll normally do is interactively test things out in the browser's console, and then transfer em over to my script. Browser dev tools are just super amazing.
Agreed - I find the Cheerio APIs to be awkward when traversing deep into the DOM. Last time I used Beautiful Soup I found it also had this problem. The DOM API that JSDOM provides is such much more natural to work with.