I think there are many things pushing towards more complexity, and not much of it is "bored developers pushing things to polish resumes". 1. It takes longer to

I think there are many things pushing towards more complexity, and not much of it is "bored developers pushing things to polish resumes". 1. It takes longer to teach someone even "simple" web dev than it does to leverage the programming talents of experienced devs. This means businesses are better off making tools that allow a small group of devs to create many simple websites or a few really complex websites than just keeping it simple. Even a small dev company can produce output that matches what used to only be possible with the resources of a much larger software company. 2. As they mentioned, the path web dev is going is towards a device independent software dev environment instead of simply serving up content or a few simple tools. This is across the board from internal IT, to small B2B, to large B2C resources. Alot of my personal programming time is adjusting the generic B2B platform to meet the needs of a specific client we have that doesn't quite fit the original project. It's frustrating, but a large source of complexity and not "unnecessary" since it pays the bills. 3. The number of devices that have to be supported by a platform is also greatly increasing, and it makes the code itself, especially on the js side, much more complex in response. I'm continually thinking "why do you want to squish our site down to your piddly little phone", but that's the primary way alot of users have access, and if you don't support it, you'll lose out to competitors that do.