There's a separate option for disabling just bleeding without removing physics damage.
As a player who only started playing in 0.8.2 back in October IMO the game isn't really too hard on the "normal" difficulty setting. ATV drain isn't that intense and without knowing about the charger I was easily able to find it anyways and learn how to hook it up myself. Didn't sell the MRE's either because it feels like cheating and I'm still able to make more than enough to do all the daily tasks. Traversing doesn't even really suck without the boots I mean how often are you going around the landscape on foot I just drive everywhere.
I do think the blood loss is super annoying though I like everything to be squeaky clean so the blood dropping and being persistent is not for my tastes.