Use a Windows VM and be done with it. Unless software has been tested to work under Wine, it likely won't work at all.
You may have at one point in the distant past tried some software that didn't work, and there certainly is still software that doesn't work, or requires fiddling to get to work, but I highly doubt you have the data to back up such a sweeping statement. In my experience, a lot of software, especially smaller applications, works out of the box now without any fiddling. The days of complicated setup instructions are mostly gone unless you are trying to run something big like Altium or Adobe Lightroom. That's a lot less hassle than maintaining a complete Windows install including licensing, updates, virus scanner etc in a virtual machine, and dealing with shared folders to transfer data over. The only time I use a virtual machine these days is if I use software that needs to talk to hardware, like the software for the UNI-T UT-330C environmental logger.
If you read the instructions in the linked thread, it's just about setting the Windows version in Wine to Windows 7, running the setup, and then running the application. I would try that before messing with VMs, which is a last resort before resorting to dual-booting.