Help with supports  

Help with supports

So, I understand that supports are a necessary evil of 3d printing, but I'm trying to minimize the pain as much as possible.

I am trying to print this: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1239437 .

And here's what I got after cleaning it:

It's not bad, and I'm relatively happy with it, but it took about 30 minutes to pull all of the supports off. The original supports were generated in Cura. I have tried Slic3r, but the supports I got on previous models were nearly impossible to remove. In my experience, Cura supports are a pain, but they come off much cleaner.

Do I have too many supports? Are there any tricks to making this faster or easier without ruining quality? FYI, I have tried Meshmixer but the tree supports confuse me. I haven't even printed one yet, but looking at the preview, half the trees don't even touch the ground, and it builds about 100 tiny, tiny trees right under this model, so I didn't even really try as there was no way it was going to print right. I tried Cura trees, and got similar confusing results.

Any help greatly appreciated. I have messed with Z distance (set at .4), interface layers (1mm, 1 layer) and threshold angle (60 degrees). In a couple of models, I have cut them along the Z axis and glued them together later to avoid supports, but this model wouldn't handle that well.