Hi Osioke 
For me the it was also the settings. I feel like I am just regurgitating your points but they are valid. When you first login and press admin it was a bit overwhelming to see that whatever you pressed revealed around 30 settings because of this I think it can be difficult to find and understand what settings you should be enabling and disabling depending on the type of community you run. However what really helps is that once you spend some time poking around in the site settings you find that you can guess where the setting will be as it is all well named such as ‘Branding, Trust levels’ or in your case searching for the setting.
Perhaps it should suggest some settings depending on what you choose in step 4 of the wizard which is how users access the site? Although I feel that this wouldn’t take into account some communities and it might seem a little aggressive to suggest settings to admins?