It’s a common fact that standard drupal edit node form is not user friendly at all. There are too many of confusing elements and field-sets.

You can hide these elements with styles or key part of them off or remove unnecessary elements by hook_form_alter. But you should think about effectiveness of work though, otherwise the solution of this problem already exists.
http://drupal.org/project/nodeformsettings
Enable this module, and key off unnecessary elements for every type of content.