You are not alone. For us it's about enjoying the fish, not spending hours a day maintaining their tank. If I liked maintaining tanks, I'd go into business maintaining other peoples tanks. Of necessity, the tank is undecorated--but our fish still manage to scrape themselves on the tank lids. What my fish really need is a padded cell. As far as "natural" decor, every day I look out and see one of the most beautiful rivers in the world.
But when you get in the river, it's full of ugly dark rocks. My husband is adamant that he does not want a rocky background in our new tank. We have no desire to try to duplicate a murky, muddy dark river scene which would be their environment in the wild.
All this said, we have rethought everything, and we will go with a modified substrateless, undecorated tank in our big set up. No substrate, but not bare floor either--going with a low profile rocky background on the floor. We have 1/4" black lamination on the back inside the tank. After much searching I found 1.5" black PVC for the eleven pipes that compose my mechanical filtration. The black on black would hardly be visible. After rethinking everything, we are going to disguise the pipes as trees, and make a low profile 3D background for an underwater forest in an endless lake look. So our plumbing will actually be "decoration" of sorts. We will still have our bare floor, undecorated tank, but with a twist.
We have a long ways to go before this poop sucker pipe resembles a 4" tree
My uptake and return pipes will all be different sized trees with knots at the Ts. (BTW the connectors in the Ts are just to keep paint off the threads) The rim of the T is the only place that white could possibly show, so I applied several coats of Krylon Fusion to the rims.
Ultimately, it comes down to personal preference. We love our fish, but hate maintenance. We must have a system that is maintenance-free as possible. Our fish will either scrape themselves or eat/destroy any decoration placed in their tank. Bare undecorated is our only option.