The documentation is complex because openHAB is as complex as it needs to be.
If you want simple then you need to look for something that is less capable. Many commercial options may for the bill for you. But any platform like OH that supports the bridging and interaction of over 350+ different apis, protocols, and technologies is going to be complex.
Did you actually read that text? Did you see that is interactive, leaning you see and experiment with each and every API endpoint, and it gives you the equivalent curl command. What more do you want from documentation for an API?
Maybe I don’t understand what you are trying to do or where you are getting lost. Perhaps this post can help: How to get started (there is no step-by-step tutorial)
There are a bunch of getting started resources there including links to YouTube videos.
Then you should completely ignore bindings and Things entirely and create Items and roles and UIs only.
But that isn’t how most users get started with oh so that isn’t what the docs are geared towards. It’s worth noting that the Demo config is just such a setup.
Maybe don’t completely ignore Things and Bindings, but sick to generic ones that will be useful even if you don’t have devices like one of the weather Bindings, Network, and Mail, for examples.
Not a whole lot that will be terribly useful. Maybe set it up to watch your devices and services and alert you when one goes offline. There are better tools for the use case but it will exercise much of oh. I do this in my system mainly because my automation may make different decisions when certain devices are offline.
That’s partially because there really isn’t just one end-to-end. There after many and its hard to stroller a balance between being thorough and overwhelming the user with lots of stuff that is irrelevant to them, or just providing detailed docs about reach potential step along there paths and there user needs to determine what their end-to-end path includes.
But, as always, anyone is welcome to write, edit, and/or improve the docs.
That would be most welcome.
Which unfortunately is incomplete. I have pointing new users at it because it is still riddled with TODOs. I keep thinking about picking it up but at this point it seems that effort might best be left to when OH 3 starts to be a thing.
I was hoping that bartus’s tutorial would become the new users tutorial at some point but I think that work had stalled. But what exists is in the link I provided above.