BuddyPress.org

Has anyone thought of a solution for this or can think of a way to accomplish it without needing to manually edit a lot of php?

This is already easy to accomplish in the BuddyPress admin menu. Log into WPMU’s backend as Site Admin. Go to the BuddyPress menu grouping. Select “Component Setup > Blog Tracking” and disable the Blogs component.

When you reload BuddyPress in your browser, you will see that the “Blogs” menu option under the “My Account” menu and the “My Blogs” menu are now gone. Also, members will not have the option to create blogs from their page.