by Howard Miller.
Moodle is a big application with quite a long list of dependencies. It is designed to scale up to massive sites with tens of thousands of users and more. Administering such a beast is never going to be entirely trivial - you do need to have, at the very minimum, an appreciation of running server side software. This is unavoidable and is quite a jump from installing Word on your desktop.
Trust me, Moodle is dead simple compared to some server-side applications. I don't know if this is any help at all...