Such verbosity (and other bloat and complexity in how AWS does things) is why I could never get excited about S3, EC2 et seq. when these services were first announced. Rightly or wrongly, I believe it is because most of AWS was originally implemented in Java. Programming in Java requires a certain comfort with verbosity and clunkiness. That showed through in early AWS interfaces and documentation. Indeed, it has alway been painful to interact with manually.