Simplifying BRP Combat?

I'd like to call upon the wisdom of readers with long experience playing games derived from Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing. Lately, I've been looking with less judgmental eyes on RuneQuest and finding within it – I speak of its 1979 second edition rather than its current iteration – worthy of greater admiration, both for its setting and for its rules, both of which really were ahead of their time.
Nevertheless, one aspect of RQ continues to bedevil me, namely combat. BRP combat, particularly in its RuneQuest iteration, is much more fiddly than I'd like. The combination of strike ranks, attack rolls, defense rolls, criticals, impales, fumbles, hit locations, and armor absorption is simply too much for my feeble mind to handle. A lifetime of playing Dungeons & Dragons has, by and large, mentally conditioned me for fast and simple combats, each round of which can be resolved with only a couple of dice rolls and the most basic of math. RuneQuest is several steps more complex than I enjoy. And yet I can't deny that there can be many benefits from complexity. I sometimes mention that, a few years ago, I had the opportunity to play Rolemaster with a referee who knew its rules well and helped make the process of using them relatively painless for me. As a consequence, I re-evaluated my older assessment of them as too arcane for my tastes. Perhaps the same is true of RuneQuest's combat system? 
That's why I'd like to hear from anyone who's refereed an RQ campaign for some length. What was your experience with combat? Did you find a way to make it run more quickly and smoothly? Is there some crucial insight into its workings that might help me overcome my concern about its fiddliness? Alternately, is there some iteration of BRP that manages to streamline combat without losing too much detail? I know that OpenQuest is well regarded in some quarters, but I haven't kept up with its development since its original release. Is that still a good option or are there others I should consider? Shower me with your thoughts on this, please.