Even Japanese, which I touched for a few years wasn’t nearly as bad.

I think this is a ‘to each his own’ sort of situation. I like the idea of kanji but am terrible at memorizing them. I’ll take German grammar over kanji any day. If you specifically mean grammar, Japanese does have its own challenges as well.

The point of languages it to be simple and efficient

According to whom? The point of language is to communicate information. There are high-context and low-context ways to do this. There are direct and indirect ways to do this, all of which encode certain cultural meaning. If you studied Japanese, think about all the indirectness, honorifics, etc. that aren’t there to be simple, they’re there for cultural and societal reasons, even if mostly just historical in some cases.