What's up with creationism?

[ApeNotKillApe]

Why not just say god created everything? Why give an exact time frame and day by day breakdown of creation if it wasn't true?

I don't know, you'd have to ask the people who wrote it. Perhaps just for the sake of telling a story rather than just saying "God created everything. The end." After all, that was the style of writing back then. A lot of poetry, allegory, metaphor, figurative speech, etc. Yes, the Old Testament was inspired by God but it wasn't written by God. It was written by men from thousands of years ago.

That seems like a pretty inefficient way to get a message across; I don't understand why an omnipotent, omnipresent being would constrain itself to the limitations of bronze age tribals.
If God wanted to communicate a message to people, why, of all the ways he could have done it, did he decide to "inspire" a handful of desert dwelling nomads in an isolated portion of the world to present his message in the form of vague parables and spread it by way of centuries of genocide, ignorance and atrocity? How many indigenous peoples were slaughtered or enslaved so that this message could get across? How many people were subjected to unspeakable torture and atrocity? How many were burned at the stake? How much violence has arisen out of disagreements over these vague texts? How much suffering have people endured simply because God couldn't think of a better way to communicate?