If all you want to do is have a recovery image and get rid of the bloatware then all you need to do is root. You will not have to redo the settings on your phone, redo your scenes or anything. All you will be doing is increasing your permissions, "su", and then adding the image writer and flashing a recovery image. It will literally take less than 10 minutes to root and you will not have to start out from scratch.
I can't recommend doing this enough, having a nandroid backup is the best thing since sliced bread. I know what you mean about having to reconfigure the phone, it sucks. Once you have a nandroid backup if you screw anything up or just make a ton of changes and want to quickly go back to what you like, it takes 5 minutes. Seriously, if you root according to these instructions, all you have to do is copy and paste these instructions if you don't want to type it out or make a mistake and it practically does it for you.
[GUIDE] How To Root The Sprint CDMA Hero (Windows) - xda-developers
Go to that site and follow those directions. The only difference is step 3. That is the old recovery so choose one of these instead. I personally prefer the blue carebear.
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Then when you get to step 18 you just make sure you change the name of the recovery you chose to reflect that.
In other words instead of:
flash_image recovery recovery-RA-heroc-v1.5.2.img
if you chose the blue carebear version you would type in:
flash_image recovery recovery-RA-heroc-v1.6.2-blue.img
of course if you chose a different recovery image then you would just make the appropriate changes. Seriously, this method takes 5 minutes and afterwards you can backup your system, install root explorer and start removing those pesky bloatware apps that you don't want. Just make sure you check the programs you want to remove against a list online to ensure you don't lose functionality on the phone. Of course you will have a backup image after you create one in recovery so you are set.
edit: By the way, you don't have to wait for the phone to lose it's luster before you start to dig into it and make it work the way you like. Like you I had just got my Hero when I rooted it the first time. I think I only had it a couple weeks and then I got bored one day and went for it. Just like you I was perfectly happy with how my Hero was working, I just had to do it because I felt like I was missing something. On my two previous Android phones, Samsung Behold 2 and Samsung Moment, I had to root them as soon as I got them because they literally did not work well at all out of the box. Rooting was the only way to make those phones usable and so when I had my Hero sitting here for a couple weeks without root on it I really felt like I wasn't giving it enough attention or something. The thing just worked, and just worked right.
Having said that, even a perfectly working Hero on Android 1.5 works even better once you remove the crapware and start making it do what you want instead of what HTC and Sprint wanted. Also, It's not just Sprint and HTC doing this, Samsung and T-Mobile do it too. T-mobile has myfaves and their account app along with games and programs from Samsung on their android phones and they really suck. Nothing like having myfaves running and using 15MB of memory when you don't even have it on your account. Also, demo versions of bejeweled, where's waldo and diner dash. Nothing like having games on your phone that you can't remove and they are only demos that you can only play so long.... Anyway, ending my rant now.