I don't think FOSS is the problem either. I think much complexity is required because everything is expected to live on the web and also/thereby is expected to

I don't think FOSS is the problem either. I think much complexity is required because everything is expected to live on the web and also/thereby is expected to be client/server. As soon as one wants to do more than just display a document on the web one discovers that its architecture is not very suitable for doing anything else besides displaying a document. A badly formatted document at that..... Also the expectation of client-server communication is a big driver of complexity. As soon as one has that we have network communication, serialization and so on. I.e., stuff that is on the large side of things to write oneself. Of course, with the web one more or less has a client-server architecture by default.