You are never going to really understand what you are doing chord wise, until you know the names of the notes in the chords that you are playing--and then you get to know what intervals you are playing--

Of course. guitar is not like piano where the same notes appear under the same keys,over and over, and of course, a lot of guitar music is just written with the chord name(and, often, it is the wrong chord) so it is no help at all, if you are trying to figure out what you are doing.

When you play six note chords, you are actually playing extra notes that you don't need to get the chord sound-- Each of those chord positions is a different inversion, which means that it gives you different notes on the bottom and top of the chord, so when you play for instance, the E chord in each of the different positions, you actually create a melodic movement in the both the bass and the treble ranges.