Terrrible

Sorry for your experience.

too much of everything.

Well, hiding WordPress isn’t something straightforward, hence the many plugin options. Each does something specific that helps to hide things. Nothing is useless, definitely not “too much”. Of course, you can use other similar plugins which are “simpler”, yet they are not doing anything and your site stay visible as using WordPress.

Then it breaks down the site.

It can happen that a specific option to not play well with your current site configuration. You just have to turn that off. That’s why there isn’t an automatic process available for the configuration, just a basic sample to get you started.

bunch of stuff in htacess

This is funny, The .htaccess is a technical file that holds the rewrites. Obviously, the functionalities are requiring rewriting to make things happen. Lots of plugins are using it ( see the cache codes ). But why would care about that?! Is like you’re saying why WordPress folders are full of files.