Many plugins making WordPress run slow by design?

I would be wary of things you read – e.g. there’s a common myth that “having lots of plugins” is a bad thing, whereas of course what matters is whether they’re well written or not. The time to load a large number of very well written plugins is neglible, whereas a line of bad code in one can easily screw things up for everything else.

There might be a case to split a plugin if it makes sense structurally, and you are likely to be able to reuse the individual plugins elsewhere, but concentrate on improving the quality of your own code first:

Make iterative improvements.
Find a good IDE.
Refactor often.