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It's a weird interaction between giving the states the power to determine what and how they tax, and the federal government being able to say that states don't have any real border between each other (unlike say, the UK and France, or France and Spain). You can't enforce tariffs or the like for goods coming in, and so you get things like use taxes to make up for lost revenue, but then if they aren't collected on a schedule, there is no real publicity about them.
Taxes could be more straight-forward in the US, I agree... but in the case of the use tax, it is more a failure of the local state to make the tax easy to comply with, and putting the notice you actually owe tax in the basement behind a door marked with a sign that reads "Beware of the Leopard."
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