Hi,
I understand your frustration. Years ago when I first got in touch with VTK that was also mine. C++ has a smooth learning curve. VTK is one of the most difficult libraries out there to configure and build. CMake syntax is a bit exotic, etc. If you’re not well acquainted with software configuring and building, VTK can be challenging indeed. I can say that only perseverance and repetition will do. The only way to grow muscle is by practicing, practicing, practicing and… practicing.
As for Paraview, it is a user friendly front end to VTK, not actually a competitor. The only serious competitor to VTK I know of is ThermoFisher’s OpenInventor. As you already guessed by the owner company (a manufacturer of high-end scientific equipment), it costs thousands of dollars a license, even for academic users.
It seems to me that your needs are more of an end-user, then you’re better off with something like Paraview, ArcGis, GMsh, etc. VTK is a high abstraction level API to lower level hardware-accelerated graphics API (e.g. OpenGL) intended to developers of scientific visualization applications, not to end-users.
take care,
Paulo