Changing/ adding/ modifying sidebars & pages

Hi,
For a tool of which the supposed intent is to build easily customizable websites, I find it odd that creating/modifying template pages and sidebars seems so…laborious. I find it odd that I have to go in and learn the call heirarchy and some code for a page, it’s template, how to modify that template, and how to tell what page to call what sidebar. All with programming. Avoiding dynamic programming is the very reason I like WP in the first place.
Scratch scratch….

• I would like to create a custom page template (ok, take page. or single.php, duplicate, rename, upload)
• I would like to create different sidebars.
• I would like an easy way to tell new page templates to use a particular sidebar.

I’m starting to figure it out conceptually but I’m kind of surprised that within all this WP admin beauty, I have to manually create new pages and sidebars with understanding php, copying, pasting, etc.

One would think there would be a straightforward, browser-based way to do at least some of this. There is a sidebar, but I think it’s “dynamic”. So I don’t know how to create a new particular sidebar.

Example: Let’s say I manage to create a new sidebar. Or a new page template. How do I tell a particular page to use that sidebar? Is there a way to do this via admin/browser?

I would think on the Edit Page screen, where you select a parent, and a page template, it would also provide a dropdown to select which sidebar to use, put on the left or right, etc.

I have found some tutorials on this but they are often too complicated or too simple for this basic task. Can anyone point to some basic but thorough template/sidebar creation/editing techniques?

Thank you very much.