Post page listing

I’ve been having issues with getting custom sidebars & templates working with the ‘posts page’ in wordpress. I setup my installs so that there is a static homepage and then a second page which contains all of the blog/news posts. (setup: https://img.paulOr.net/Fydt.png )

I then create a custom template for the blog & single post pages and try to apply the templates to them, however the blog page never seems to work, i always have to hack around in loop.php to get it working and it always seems to me to be a bit of a rubbish way of doing things. I’m sure i remember back in the days of 2.x that I could just apply a template to the ‘blog’ page and it would set on this page?

Am i being silly and going about this the wrong way? Some advice would be epic.