I don't think that difficulty is overboard. Yes, survival difficulty is hard, but as long as you always play it safe, you will be able to progress. Some guy above gave you some tips. Follow them, thats how you play the game. I am in chapter 13, and I have died about 30 times only. Some people claim that they finished the game on survival and died 200 times... I really don't know how that is possible. I am not good at gaming, just like you, I normally svck at these types of games, but I am progressing in the survival difficulty with no real hardships. Just a few deads where I got careless. Now, my uncle started playing it in casual difficulty... man that was easy. You get more ammo, and enemies die more quickly. I think that you are playing this game like a COD style, running arround shooting everything. Here are some tips, that helped me with the survival difficulty.
1- Don't run around, walk, and crouch a lot.
2- Go slowly, assume that there is an enemy behind every door or corner and be ready to take it out.
3- Avoid wasting resources as much as you can. Try to sneak kill as much as you can.
4- search the areas for resources, don't try to rush the game, search every corner.
5- Traps... put a lot of attention to your surrounding looking for traps.
6- If you walk or croush most of the time, you will be able to easilly avoid every traps.
7- DO NOT deactivate traps until every enemy in the area is dead. Lure them to the traps, that way you can avoid wasting ammo.
8- When encountering more than one enemy, shot one of them in the legs, when they fall, burn it. Try to time it so that you can burn other enemies too. That saves a lot of ammo.
9- If you are not good with headshots, shot at the legs, when they fall, go for the headshot. Sometimes takes 2 headshot to kill the enemy.
10- Use the Agony arrow, the ones that are like a Flash, they blind enemies and you can go for a sneak kill. This works amazing against some types of enemies. Figure wish ones yourself.
11- Try to have your health at full most of the time. Most enemies will kill you 1 hit on survival difficulty if you have 30% or less of your health.
12- Bosses... Use your surrounding to slow them down, use traps to damage them etc.
In survival I have killed most of the bosses withouth wasting about half of my resources, so that means you don't need to use your entire arsenal to kill bosses, at least for most of them.
If they lower the difficulty bellow the casual, the game will break. In a survival Horror Game , dying must have a penalty. In this game, it is that you must start all over again from checkpoint. This makes it better, because you will try at all costs to be alive.