Is there still no convenient way to hide an article's content on the category blog page?

Question

I've been using K2 since Joomla 1.5. I noticed that in recent versions Joomla has done a lot of improvements to its content system, so I decide to switch back to use vanilla Joomla com_component for my latest project. What I want is simply an article list page displaying only an intro image and article title for each article that is in a category, which upon clicking will lead to the article's content page. To my surprise, it seems there is no simple way to do this.

Firstly, the "Category list" menu item type will display an ugly old-fashioned table listing all the articles, I see no way to easily add intro image to this list; On the other hand, "category blog" will always show the full content of articles unless I choose to hide intro text and add a "readmore" <hr> at the beginning of every article, which is a lot of extra work. Very disappointing! Did I miss anything here or should I just switch back to use 3rd party article component extensions like zoo or k2?

Answer 1

I could be wrong about this, because it's not something I've attempted to set up, but I assume you could do this with a custom blog layout template. You can specify the number of characters of intro text (to 0) and include the featured image. While this isn't exactly simple, you set it up once and then don't have to worry about it again.