Yup, I agree on the 'smaller architecture' bit. One more point: I find that there are a lot of very common things that we, as developers, have not 'standardize

Yup, I agree on the 'smaller architecture' bit. One more point: I find that there are a lot of very common things that we, as developers, have not 'standardized' on - but if we did, it would be beneficial. The underscore/lodash JS libraries are great examples of this. They are not just a bunch of 'helper functions' - they are really a series of new 'functional keywords' that in a way represent a new paradigm in software: we all get used to these 'mini patterns' and call them the same thing, and when used in code they can make things a lost simpler. Map, reduce, find, each, pull, filter etc. etc. - at first glance it would seem compulsive to jam all these into some code - but once the developers are familiar with them ... guess what - they become almost part of the programming language itself. So I think this is a pretty good example of a 'meta' way to facilitate simplicity: agree on names for very common patterns, and abstract them away with tools or linguistic constructs.