Hi, throughout my Japanese study I've encountered maaaany many words, as you would expect. However, I don't really have a set way of remembering them. I save almost every new word I come across in my dictionaries (Tagaini and such), but they just sit there and are sometimes browsed through. I don't quite think that's an effective way to acquire vocabulary. I'm sick of using SRS and I pretty much try to avoid it all the time, so I need another way.

So, what do you guys do to remember the massive ocean of words?

Also, for the "sentence method", the problems I usually encounter when adding new cards are 1) I can't find, or it takes too long to find, a sentence for a certain word I want to study, 2) the sentence I find has way too many new words to remember, 3) I'm unsure about what the sentence is saying, 4) it takes an incredibly long time to add all the furigana and meanings to all the words I don't know. Any ways to fix these kinds of problems?

Well, with vocabulary, I guess you either use it or lose it.
SRS seems like the obvious way, but if you don't want to do that, how about going through your list of words, looking up sentences that they appear in, and then try using the word in a new sentence you made by yourself?

these problems are the core of what happens when you start learning a language. they are what make it difficult, and the people who have done it respected. there is no way around them but only through.

the best advice is to find native media you are compelled by for whatever reason and use that compulsion as an anesthesia while hacking away at the mountain of work that lies ahead.

like running on a treadmill with the tv on...

You can create vocab lists for things you want to learn, such as a manga, anime, drama, or a short story or article. Go over the word list, and then read the story a few times over several days. Put it aside, come back to it in a week or so, see what you've retained, and review anything you've missed. I do that in conjunction with SRS, and it seems to work. Learning vocab in conjunction with interesting content helps make it stick.

I've also found it helps to listen to arbitrary native content, such as podcasts chock full of dialogue. I often have the pleasant experience of running across vocab words I've recently learned. If I hear a word and think, "Hey, I think I knew that word once!", then I pause the recording and look it up.

Re: sentences - I don't do them, but if you don't understand a sentence, I'd suggest not SRSing it, and focusing on simpler content until you level up.