General question about themes

I’ve used wordpress a few years back and I need to get a blog site up and going; however, this time around, my experience with wordpress has been much less pleasant. My unpleasant experience has mostly come from frustration with a decreased helpfulness of themes. In the past I was able to find a theme that had the general appearance and design that fit for my needs and I was able to load it, make a handful of minor modifications and I was on my way; however, this time around, while I am still finding themes with samples/examples that appear to fit what I am looking for, after I load the themes, there is little to nothing that looks like the marketed examples. I have spent hours trying to figure out how to get the respective themes to have some resemblance to the samples with little luck. I am also discouraged by how it appears now that making minor modifications in appearance is increasingly requiring users to have to learn more and more code. Though customization through coding appears to have really extended the possibilities of wordpress, the user friendliness appears to have tanked. A few times I have also attempted to seek out theme authors thinking that perhaps I might find or be able to contact the author for instructions on recreating the sample or pay to have them do so, but still have have had little success in obtaining contact info. I am having the same experience with widgets and plugins. I find what I think looks like it might work. Install it successfully, and then can’t figure out how to make it work/look like the examples (if there is an example rather than just an explanation that sounds like it might work for me, but there’s really no telling). I hunt through the internet to find further information and the only info I can sometimes find is dead threads with no ultimate answers.

One example of this problem was in trying to set up Baskerville. After loading it and whether I make a child of the theme or not, there is little that looks or functions like the sample advertised. Not only is the search in the wrong place, there are 3 of them. 2 on the left of screen below the menu, awkwardly stacked on top of each other and another in one of the footers.

Why don’t themes and widgets look like samples after they are loaded and activated without users having to do coding to get it to what is marketed as looking like? It would take months for me to learn the code necessary to accomplish a basic setup, which is currently very discouraging because I would really like to and need to do this. I also have very very little budget to pay someone to do a basic setup. If themes just loaded like sample images much of this problem would not exist.

Not mad…just really discouraged.
Thoughts anyone???