[texhax] Calss file

[Karl Berry]

    single-column, double-spaced, 10-12 pt font, 1 inch margins, no
    fancy-appearing headings, . . . . all in all fairly "plain."

Isn't that more or less what the article \documentclass is?
Oh, it's not double-spaced. See the FAQ on this:
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=linespace

    And, I found the CTAN archives fairly difficult to search.
    Difficult for me to tell, based on the snippet description, what
    some of the packages do, without going several menus "deep" to find
    the readme files.  Is there a way to make them more
    self-explanatory?

Often, the brief output is preferable.  Something has to be the default ...

If you haven't tried it, http://www.ctan.org/search/ has a search box
for the `catalogue'.  If you search that (instead of for filenames), the
resulting list has links to the full catalogue entries ...

HTH,
k