Simplicity is an advantage but sadly complexity sells better (2022)

Why Complexity Sells and Persists

• Buyers often equate more features and knobs with “enterprise-grade” and flexibility, so bloated CMS/ERP/security products are easier to sell than lean tools.
• Complexity helps build moats: vendor lock‑in, training revenue, certification ecosystems, and job security for specialists.
• Some customers actively avoid adapting their workflows to off‑the‑shelf tools; they’d rather pay for heavy customization than change.
• Complex, buggy systems can also be convenient excuses for missed deadlines or incompetence (“the software wouldn’t let me”).
• In consumer products, aspirational buyers tolerate gimmicky, complex UIs if they signal luxury, status, or “innovation.”

Simplicity vs. Flexibility and “Real” Requirements

• Many note that “simple” solutions can be inflexible or suboptimal once you consider diverse use cases, integration needs, and evolving requirements.
• Organizations often prefer one big configurable system over many small focused ones, even if that means lots of unused features.
• There’s disagreement on what “simple” even means; what’s simple for an expert can be complex for the average team.

Incentives in Companies and Academia

• Promotion systems that reward “solving complex problems” incentivize engineers to seek or manufacture complex problems and solutions.
• Committees often can’t distinguish inherently hard problems from overengineered ones, so visible technical complexity becomes a career asset.
• Academic reviewers frequently penalize methods that are too simple or composed of existing parts, even though simple methods are easier to adopt and reason about.

UI and Product Examples

• Microwaves, blenders, and car dashboards illustrate the “Microwave Problem”: most people use a tiny subset of controls, yet minimal UIs are hard to sell.
• Some argue marketing can flip this by selling “removal of cruft” as a premium feature; others say people also genuinely value having options.
• Car UX debates: some praise touchscreen‑heavy EVs as simpler overall; others find them dangerous and unwieldy compared to physical controls.

Engineering Practice and Over‑Complex Stacks

• Many examples of unnecessary “scalabilitization”: Kubernetes for tiny loads, Cassandra/DynamoDB where a single relational DB would suffice, Hadoop/K8s clusters that never justified their cost.
• Frontend/JS and DevOps are repeatedly cited as domains where layered frameworks and fads create huge incidental complexity.
• Several commenters emphasize iterative refinement (Kaizen), small impactful changes, and opinionated/simple tools as antidotes, while warning that simple solutions are often the hardest to design.