Hello!
We appreciate your feedback.
Intense is very large and can be difficult to work through. Most shortcodes have many more options than are necessary, but we wanted to offer the options. We have considered making a free version that would offer only the basic shortcodes, with limited options. We will continue to look into this as an option.
There are a number of shortcodes that show or hide options depending on what is selected. We do try to steer a person in one direction, so not to have them filling out extra options that will not be applied. If you are using Visual Composer, the show/hide options do not work. This makes it more difficult to traverse through the settings, because you are always seeing all of the options. We do our best with integration with Visual Composer, but we are somewhat limited in what we can do.
If you are interested in how we did a shortcode on the intenseplugin.com site, you can always click the collapsible that is below the content on each shortcode page. The collapsible holds the code that was used to create each of the various shortcodes you see. This may not help a lot, but it might give you some direction.
We do hope that you figure things out and get more familiar with Intense. If you need specific help or you have other questions, please let us know.
Thanks,
Josh