You have learned that you need to pre-define message definitions before you can generate the messages from your own programs, and it seems to be an unnecessary level of complexity to have to do this.
There are several very good reasons for this feature.
Don't you hate it when you get an error message from a program, and it says something uninformative like "unexpected error"? Something like that gives you no clue as to what went wrong. Ideally, each error message would give you the reason it happened, what some of the causes could be, and possible resolutions. Using pre-defined message definitions allows you to enter as much information as you have, as the developer, to help those that will eventually be faced with responding to the messages from your program.
You could just as easily put all of this descriptive text into your code and have your code output it, however, this would significantly bloat your code. MessageMaster gives you the opportunity to provide detailed message descriptions without having them clutter your code.
As time goes by, you discover additional information that you would like to have as part some of your messages. Maybe someone has discovered an additional cause for one of your errors, or a better solution. With MessageMaster message definitions, you can easily go in and update your message text without ever updating and re-releasing your code.
Over time, the message definitions for your errors and messages become a knowledge base for problems and resolutions involving your in-house programs.
In a large enterprise where supporting different languages is required, MessageMaster provides an easy way to provide your message definitions in more than one language. For instance, you could use the Version level of the hierarchy to specify language, e.g. 2.5ENG and 2.5GER. Your program would simply need to use the version corresponding to the language of the messages you want to generate.