>I don't quite understand your objection to the tax code example. In every business domain there are real world constraints that cause people to want business r

>I don't quite understand your objection to the tax code example. In every business domain there are real world constraints that cause people to want business rules of ever increasing complexity. The IRS cares about the definition of "income"; maybe your business cares about which ads get seen by which users or how much you should charge for a cell phone plan. What seemed simple at first is almost certainly incredibly complicated after 20+ years of exposure to humans. Because you were mapping (something like) "citizen-initiated policy requests about what to reward/penalize" to "customer requests for software features". To the extent that that mapping is valid, it is not (I claim) the cause of tax complexity. Rather, such complexity comes from the inherent difficulty of operationalizing "income" against motivated parties, which (I claim) is more closely analogous to "inherent domain complexity". Now, to be sure, you can go back a level and frame "citizen desire to tax income [without realizing the implied complexity]" as a "customer request with inherent hidden complexity" -- but still, you were claiming the source of tax code complexity was from "desire to reward specific behaviors", which it (still) isn't. In short, "Let's reward electric cars" does very little for tax complexity compared to, "oh crap, people can dodge virtually all their taxes by having employers buy their personal needs". >JIRA seems like another great example, actually. JIRA's key feature is that any organization can customize workflows in whatever way they want. Is it slow and bloated? Yes, all that customizability comes at a cost, even if you don't use it. That customizability was driven by customer requests. No. There is no inherent reason why being able to customize workflows comes at the cost of e.g. a browser not being able to keep up with my typing speed or a hundred trackers having to load every time. (There are a ton of other unnecessary pains I've encountered unrelated to that but I'd need to check my notes.)