Are there alternative ways to creating themes in Drupal 7?
The short answer is "no." At least not at the level you are looking for.

A .info file is always required for a Drupal theme, this is how Drupal recognizes that the theme exists. Adding CSS and JS within this file is important because of CSS/JS caching which is important for site performance and other reasons. You should read the Drupal Theming Guide for more information, if you haven't.

There is, however, no requirement for template.php in a theme. If you do not want to utilize RDF on your site, you can disable the core RDF module.

There are other Theme Engines for Drupal, but they have all been abandoned in favor of PHPTemplate in Drupal 7. There are also a number of contributed base themes for Drupal, which are helpful for getting started with theming more quickly.

Unfortunately, the theming approach of Drupal is often a shock for users coming from other CMSes, especially Wordpress. The inherit flexibility and functional power in (and legacy of) Drupal core necessitates an extremely complex theming layer. You are not going to find a Wordpress-like experience in Drupal 7.