In my experience, English has it´s own pitfalls and is not that much simpler. I think this is a learning curve thing, why the two languages are seen as such. The learning curve for German at the beginning is really high (for a non-native speaker), but once it clicks German becomes mega-easy, since it is a toolbox for building. The currently longest correct sentence in German clocks in at 1077 words, not something you see in everyday use, but what is possible.
English starts with a rather low learning curve, you can become halfway decent rather quick, but if you go deeper into English the learning curve ratchets up very quickly and some rules are rather strange. Even some beginner stuff is not that easy as it might seem to a native speaker. For instance, "I eat" and "I am eating" is something e.g. German does not distinguish at all. While we can state an equivalent of "I am eating", this is done very rarely and is considered overspecific.
Where most of the differences between German and English come from is the deep structure, which is decidedly different today. Both languages descended from a mother tongue of the SOV "verb final" type. English developed to a strict SVO type over time, German is of the very rare V2/OV type. In German the finite verb comes in second sentence position, all other verbs come at the end.
So while the easy sentences "I eat bread/Ich esse Brot" look identical, they are not when it comes to underlying grammatical structure. In English you HAVE TO begin a sentence with the subject, in German literally anything can stand at the beginning the sentence and often does. Even this small sentence "Ich esse Brot" could be changed into "Brot esse ich" without any loss of meaning and being completely valid.
