honestly, the admin panel looks a lot worse than it is.

real talk? i can almost guarantee you won't use half of that panel at all and more than three-quarters of it for day-to-day use. (i know it throws a lot at you at once, but tbeh, i actually find it much better organized than the proboards admin area, with a few exceptions, like the permission mask vs member group divide or custom profile fields being under the edit user area rather than the skinning area.)

but also, as a general tip, you can actually limit the acp to only display the categories you actively use (which i very highly recommend, it limits access to areas you don't need people able to mess with + makes the overall acp a lot more manageable just as a general thing). of those, tbeh, i would say that most sites only really access the forum control, users + groups, and skins + templates on a regular basis for obvious reasons and then setup typically only expands into the jfh resources (for the file manager + premium), system settings, administration (to remove emoji), custom ubbc code (to add in a blockquote), and maybe the ib store (for points / the built-in shop).

i keep meaning to actually take notes when i work on a site specifically for this purpose, to walk people through how to set up a jcink site on the back end (and then forgetting when it comes time to do it), but honestly, i don't think it takes a whole lot of time to figure out once you actually get past that "oh shoot that's a lot of options" knee-jerk response.