Hi, Dan!
I myself have Office 2007 on my desktop and have used Outlook 2007 in the past for emails. It's certainly got a ton of bells and whistles — way more than I'd ever need — but I imagine that's because, as you say, it was more "organizational," more for business use or for those individuals who really wanted that much functionality with their email client. IOW, it likely was never meant for those who wanted "just" email. As you know, way back when it was Outlook Express that was MS's own offering for those who didn't need all the extra office features with their desktop client.
But in general you may be comparing apples and oranges here: MS desktop vs. Google webmail. If you don't like using Outlook 2013 for email, have you tried their Outlook.com webmail? I'm guessing that you'd be able to have all your other online Office 365 programs as well as SkyDrive/OneDrive all accessible from the one MS account. ?? That way you'd get less bloat in your email client (by using Outlook.com webmail instead of the more business oriented Outlook 2013) while still having reasonably good integration with your other programs (OneDrive, Office 365, etc.). (I say "reasonably good," because in my limited past experience MS had not been as good at having all their products play nice with each other as Google has been with theirs.