This is roughly my litmus test: Do I see a lot of examples of people running into problems, and the solution turns out to be an obscure configuration (or worse,

This is roughly my litmus test: Do I see a lot of examples of people running into problems, and the solution turns out to be an obscure configuration (or worse, a case where the default configuration is something that should never be done)? Do I see evidence of a lot of cases where the right way to do things is not the obvious way to do things? Both of these are red flags. Sure, I can learn how to steer around all the potholes. But so will everyone else who works on the project. Eventually someone will miss some important detail, or go on a refactoring expedition and end up removing a bunch of what appears to be excess complication but is actually a carefully constructed workaround for some wart in the system (the comment explaining this having long since been deleted - or maybe migrated to the team wiki, where all good information goes to die - by someone who had been watching a lot of Uncle Bob videos on YouTube at the time), and then production bugs sneak in, and eventually people quite rationally start to blame the technology.