All I want to do is make a custom Alpha Rex variant that I can play around with stats on and no matter what I do, this user unfriendly devkit just wants to fight with me. I may go back to the older Unreal editors. I actually enjoyed those and could accomplish simple things unlike this Dev Kit.
It’s not that unfriendly… try modding Total War series with a bunch of user-developed tools!
Suggest you read the sticky FAQ/help links… and every link in them. The info is there… but you need to read the help info or yes, you will get overwhelmed. I would say the devkit is an intermediate difficulty modding tool.
Many/most guides & videos assume you have basic knowledge of the editor so they skip a few steps here and there in their guides & videos about how to even start up a project step by step.
The problem often is that many ARK modders have little to no UE4 editor startup experience at all.