You are right that on most of these sites people expect you to be damn near perfect. I've been around a lot of them in my day because I'm similar to you in that I have a very hard time socially and online is really all I can handle. It can be quite upsetting though. I tend to get a lot of flirts and messages from guys I have literally nothing in common with, like they didn't read a single sentence of my profile, and the few guys that I meshed well with on a personal level didn't like what they saw when I got the courage to show them what I look like. It hasn't done any favors for my self-worth...

As for sites I recommend, the only one I feel is worth anything (and it's not much) is eHarmony. You can send 5 questions for free to help weed out if someone is worth paying to talk to. They also do free communication periods sometimes where you can send messages for free. During that time if you like the person you can give them an alternative contact method to continue discussion beyond the eH site because the messages (and custom question responses) are not moderated. Some people put an alternative contact in their profile all clever-like to get around auto-moderation, but I wouldn't recommend doing so because you could get random creepers contacting you that way.

Also possible is to look up specific sites for your interest group. In my case gaming, so I searched for "dating sites for gamers" and got a decent one. Be very very very careful with anything that is 100% free or mostly free though. As justafriend said, these are great places for scammers, but also for extremely desperate people who don't really value a relationship for what it is. The site I found recently is mostly free (you can earn everything for free though) and I've talked to a few different guys on there and none of them seemed scammer-like, they just weren't for me.