As an alternative to booleans (for organic hole shapes, anyway) is to play around with bevelplus a bit. Use curves to draw the main shape, then draw other shapes within (for the holes), select the main shape and shift + select the inner shapes, then perform BP on it. Play with the settings in the channel box if you want hard edges and no bevel to it. The caveat to using this is that the end caps are each a single face so if you need to build off either, you'd have to manually split across the face from each side...this can be a drag if you have a lot of vertical edges. If it's just something you perform BP on and leave alone, it's a non-issue...like using the text tool.