Flustered by hyphens? You sound like somebody who may have been required to spend too many hours poring over the AP Stylebook, which keeps changing the rules on those.

For ages, it required you to hyphenate dual identities like African-American. But dropped that a couple of years ago and now wants you to list dual identifies like "African American" with no hyphen. But that can cause its own problems, so while I generally follow AP, sometimes I just say: Forget it. I'm doing whatever makes the point clearest.