I rarely ever use functions anymore. My life is complicated enough, I like my code to be simpler. I used to be proud of my numerous functions and clever designs.. now simple objects and mostly classes. I don't and won't argue with anyone who prefer to use plain functions, but it really annoys me when I need to spend 5mins wrapping my mind around all those functional relationships where a simple OOP (or imperative) code would have done the job perfectly.
It sounds like you're trying too hard to reason about functions as if they were, well, objects. You don't need to wrap your mind around "functional relationships" because functions don't have relationships. They just take arguments and return values (which can be other functions). Functional programming is not more complicated, if anything it's less complicated. It's just different, so it requires un-learning a lot of the things you learned about procedural and object-oriented programming. And if you have a good compiler/typechecker it will do the job with much less potential for bugs.
I have a hard time thinking of a situation where proper objects-and-functions code becomes easier to understand by removing the functions. Do you have any examples ?
