Ah, my friend, you are speaking to the choir in here, or at least a fellow soloist. I don't draft any of my short stories, blog posts, or papers at all either, just write them up, proof read, and go. Large projects though definitely require a bit of organization lest you lose your mind. Plus, it saves you a bit of work in the long run. The trick is finding your own way of building, and I don't know if there are any shortcuts. I do like Scrivener for massive projects because then you can leap around your 40 pages of outline without losing your mind, but I have a feeling that 24 thousand words of planning for a massive project makes sense to me in a way. I can say that I feel your frustration here maybe it's just cause you are used to formulating and finishing rather than taking the line it out scenic route. I know I am feeling a bit of that right now at times as I work on this novel.
Whatever you are working on sounds pretty intriguing though!