I have never really understood this sentiment, yes, OpenWrt doesn't give you mandatory firstboot guided configuration assistants, but the configuration pages for the basics (wan/ lan) are straight forward and imho on par with commercial- and other 3rd party firmwares (in a sense more so, as it's always the same, for any supported device). While I do share some criticism about the wlan configuration (not all important settings (regdom, channel, essid, encryption) on one visual page, but scattered through 3+ sub-tabs), it's not really difficult either, once you've gone through the pages.
At least to me, it would be quite interesting what exactly looks so strange and difficult to you.
The advanced features are another topic (and to some extent this also applies to sqm), but that's a direct consequence of having the possibilities and flexibilities of these features in the first place, while staying within the confinements of small flash sizes and supporting a wide variety of different devices and device classes (routers, access points, NAS, switches, etc. - from mips over arm, to x86_64, including architectures no one really knows) use cases, features and environments. Of course a walled garden without any installable addons would be easier to streamline, but you lose access to any configuration options the designer didn't think of originally that way.
Disclaimer: I am seeing the firmware interfaces of varying OEM firmwares quite regularly (ideally only shortly, before installing OpenWrt), but I find those often more confusing in their attempt to make things 'easier' and to hide more advanced -but common- settings, be it:
- unskippable firstboot assistants, which won't work anyways (VLAN on WAN, havving to spoof the WAN MAC address)
- hiding VLAN settings or not offering them at all (at least not for multiple VLANs on the LAN side)
- disabling IPv6 by default and only providing a very limited set of options there
- not always providing access to the channel settings ('mesh' uplinks), while also doing a bad job of avoiding interference/ congested channels
- only very rudimentary settings for static DHCP leases, often with no local DNS resolution
- let's not even start about VPN options...
- very different GUIs, even for devices from the same manufacturer (and the same time frame)
- a strong push from vendors to short-lived smartphone config apps (we've been there in the past already, with windows-xp-only configuration apps for ISDN pbx systems and routers/ switches, or flash/ java based GUIs...) and proprietary (sometimes paid) cloud integration. Networking devices may easily outlive XP, the android version of the day, flash or browser-side java applets - and the lifetime of any proprietary cloud has been shorter than mine, so far.
- let's not even talk about the chinese-language-only webinterfaces from Xiaomi
[this might be better split off into another thread, but I am genuinely interested what is considered to be difficult about the basic OpenWrt configuration].