The best thing about Discourse is while there is of course a learning curve (as with anything technical these days), you are highly capable of being able to customize the things you wish to customize. I promise!
We write these topics to help our community to learn how to do things on their own, and sometimes when things get a little too difficult, we are always here to help.
That being said, the help you are asking for can definitely be attained by reading through the topics I linked earlier!