Over the years, I've wrestled with Apache more often than I care to recall, and been astounded about how complex some simple tasks ("set up a virtual server to serve up this directory hierarchy over https with password authentication", for example) are.
A couple of days ago I needed to set up just that on an embedded device (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2) to serve up logfiles. I was steered towards a thing I'd heard of mostly as a reverse proxy, rather than a backend server, Nginx (http://nginx.org/). Straightforward configuration, even first time, so I was able to write a config pretty much from scratch where I understand what each line does (be honest: how much of the last Apache configuration you did do you understand?) and where the config, even including a virtual server, ssl configuration, Basic Authentication and merging two hierarchies on the machine to form one hierarchy over http only totals to (forty!) lines.
ian