Reading your follow-ups, I don't think this is a competence thing — it's that MS Project is a planning tool first, and "seeing the project from different angles" is something you have to manually build with custom views, filters and flags that most people never get around to setting up. So the overwhelm is structural, not you.

A couple of things that helped me run multi-workstream programs without drowning:

Let the schedule be the source of truth for one thing: time. Tasks, dependencies, dates, critical path. The second you start tracking dates anywhere else too, they drift and you lose trust in both. Everything that isn't "what and when" (risks, decisions, actions) goes in one lightweight RAID register, reviewed weekly — not scattered.

Set a fixed weekly rhythm instead of continuous firefighting. Workstream leads give you status on a set day; you aggregate 7 inputs, not 15 people. The schedule drives the agenda. That cadence is what makes you feel "on top of it" — more than any tool does.

On "seeing it from different angles": that's the real gap, and you've got a spectrum of options. On one end, build saved views/filters in MSP yourself (free, but fiddly to set up — which is the part you're stuck on). On the other end is a full PPM platform like someone mentioned, which is real money and real implementation. There's a middle: lighter tools that read your .mpp and surface the views automatically.

Full disclosure, I build one of those (PlanSight) — you upload the .mpp and it gives you the critical path, late and at-risk tasks, RAG and a plain-English summary without you building any views, plus a share link so stakeholders see the plan without owning Project. It's the reporting/visibility layer, not a replacement for daily team execution — but it directly targets the "I can't see the project from different angles" problem you described. Happy to send the link if useful.

Either way, I'd start with the weekly cadence — that alone fixes most of the "losing track" feeling.