Joining bug????

I've been attempting to get my DB tuned to handle joins as best as 
possible. However, no matter which way I try to perform the joins, if I 
attempt to join more than two or three tables the joins becomes 
unbearably long not matter how many indexes I create in however many ways.

My only solution was to create a hybrid table that contains the join of 
all of the tables I'm searching on with multi-keyed indexes. This is a 
VERY kludgy solution that makes changing the keys to my DB hard to change.

IS there a problem with postgresql in performing joins? Is there a fix? 
What gives?

-=pierre