Not at all. Those "bells and whistles" you decry have negligible impact its ease of use, as it's been designed such that the extras (due dates, priorities, projects, etc) are only there if/when you actually want to use them.
Having tried, I can't make it build and run on SuSE 8.1. Having read the page, yes, if all I want is a list of tasks, no doubt TaskWarrior and do it. I don't think it's a bad tool, not at all.
It just doesn't look like what I want. I like being able to just go in and edit the task list. I like being able to use the Unix philosophy and have sorting, prioritising, selecting, and counting in a pipeline.