If I understand what you’re trying to do correctly, you will need to create a plugin to make that modification (or fork the entire discourse repo and use that in your app.yml, but that is absolutely not recommended).
I know, “plugin” sounds like overkill because it’s a big word. But all a plugin really does it modifies/amends discourse’s code, which is exactly what you’re trying to do, right? Of course you can do so much more with plugins than change 2 lines of code, but changing those two lines is entirely possible and not overkill at all. It’s pretty much the same as what you’ve tried, only the “proper” way. It’s so easy that even I was able to do it:
Check out that topic and see if you can make it work for your case.
I am not a coder either. Did you read the topics linked in the previous posts?
There is always room for improvement, but I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. You are trying to customize discourse beyond what is foreseen in the UI (which is very easy to use). If you want to “hack” a software, you can’t really blame it for that being difficult.
Besides, the community here is usually quite helpful…