But I would rather vote for someone, then have a group of people tell me who to vote for...
You can have your cake and eat it to. Simplest to understand is vote ranking but proportional systems can give you what you want without even needing a complex ballot. There are proportional systems that allow you to chose a candidate as your first preference but express a party to support as well. Then the 'losing' and 'excess' ballots are used to elect the candidates at large from the party slate, ensuring that all voters are equal regardless of geography, gerrymandering, etc. Germany is a good example of this and as a result it is a country with a very diverse set of parties that reflects the electorate very well.
And besides, unless you are doing a write in candidate, the odds are you are voting on the basis of party nomination anyway in a first past the post system. So even though you have a 'choice', it's just a choice between two guys.
When the constitution was written, democracy like we knew it didn't exist. Nobody knew to expect things like vote splitting, gerry-mandering, etc. We have more then two centuries of experience to build off of but we are still using the system they invented back when they knew nothing. Kinda silly. It's not amoral or anything it's just obsolete.