I know you said Actions seemed a complicated way of doing things, but if you do record it as an Action from the beginning you can always quickly apply the Action to the original again and watch it go through to see what was/wasn't successful. Also you can tick and untick the Action boxes to remove unsuccessful stages. (Although beware problems involving selections and image sizes).

The problem with History is it takes up so much memory. The way I do it is taking a Snapshot of any stage I think successful that I may want to go back to, because it will save the history to the stage.

You can also lengthen the amount of history you allow PS to save somewhere, I cant remember where though. It just takes up so much memory though. EDIT: Found it: Prefernces > General > History States.