I have found this bash function a while ago. It doesn't save all the steps, but it shouldn't be too difficult to add them, too.
Without atool you have to either 1) create a temporary dir youself and do the dance I showed above, or 2) always inspect every archive before you decompress it to see if it has multiple top-level files, or 3) accept that typing "tar xvf" or similar will sometimes spam your current directory (often $HOME) with thousands of files.
Similar to how git tends to remove mental blocks around branching (you not longer have ot worry about the cost of making an arbitrary change), atool frees you from having to worry about how an archive was created. This has, in practice, saved huge amount of time and mental effort.