I think the difficulty is mainly in the lack of teacher support materials. If you found algebra overwhelming yourself, NEM would not be the series for you, but that doesn't sound like it will be a problem!
As long you don't need a full solutions manual or extra teaching hints, you'll be fine. It is stylistically different from PM, just in being more textbooky, but we haven't found it dull. It just
looks different.
I was originally planning to work through as written except DS asked if we could just finish Algebra instead of switching, and that was fine with me. In retrospect I think it worked out well with our long term plan, because after Algebra we could go off on our rabbit trail of Statistics - which depends on algebra much more than on geometry. Not that we couldn't have found a different rabbit trail, but that's the one we wanted to do and it worked out perfectly.
