The first and most important thing you need to understand about using the past perfect was expressed by FumbleFingers here.
The guiding principle should be don’t use Past Perfect unless you really have to.
The reason your friend found your sentences ‘busy’ is probably that the word before expresses everything you want the past perfect to express.
I met you before you met her. You could also express this as
I met you and then you met her.
The second thing to understand, about perfect constructions in general, is that a perfect construction does not narrate a prior event, it expresses a current state which exists as a consequence of the prior event. For instance:
We arrived at the cave, only to find that the mouth was blocked by six feet of sand. Luckily, I had packed a shovel, so we were able to clear an entrance.
That is, the past perfect expresses the fact that when you arrived you had a shovel in your possession, because earlier you had packed one. In cinematic terms, it's not a ‘flashback’, a jump backward in time, but a sort of temporal ‘pull out’—the ‘camera’ backs up so the field of vision brings the past into view, but it remains as it were focused on the point at which you discovered the sand.
Consequently, the past perfect should be used only when your narrative has defined a specific point in time (the technical term is Reference Time) at which the state established by the prior event becomes relevant. This is not the case with your two sentences:
I met you before you had met her. ... there is no Reference Time after their meeting to which the past perfect is related.
I had met you before you met her. ... This is closer to working, but it still does not define a time at which your earlier acquaintance became relevant. This might be established (and usually would be) by further context:
I met her—it was the first time the three of us were together—at that dinner at Spiro's. The two of you were just becoming a thing, but I had met you long before you met her, so you and I were more relaxed with each other. I think that bothered her, and is why she still resents me.
Typically we use the past simple (saw) for events in the past and the past perfect (had seen) for events further in the past. For example, you could say:
I had seen my brother asleep when I left home in the morning, but then later I saw him at the bank.
You'll need to give us more context for these sentences to know which one would be more correct, because they can both be used in different situations.
Best Answer
Yes you can do this. The past perfect is not like the present perfect, requiring present relevance - or, rather, it can be like the present perfect in the past, but it can also be used for a simple past-relative-to-another-point-in-the-past, with no requirement for continuing relevance.
I can actually find two possible meanings for "he had already left the house yesterday". The one I find most likely (in the absence of any context) is
But also possible is: