First of all, greetings, and welcome to the forum! I hope that you find your time here to be helpful and enjoyable! 
That said, as to your question:
No, you’re not missing anything, I daresay: DirectGUI can be clunky to work with, at times.
For myself, I sometimes make convenience functions to generate and lay out my GUI-widgets.
However, there is a community-made tool that may well make working with DirectGUI much easier: DirectGui Designer: