Agree. Factoring in the business process (esp a somewhat formalized one) as well as the notion of economic value would help to introduce a pragmatic separation

Agree. Factoring in the business process (esp a somewhat formalized one) as well as the notion of economic value would help to introduce a pragmatic separation between essential and accidental complexity. I guess what gets interesting is when the business process is fussy itself (e.g. in a start-up setting) and that is when the direction of programming and software development at large takes in a more reinforcement learning discourse v.s. a pure top-down reductionistic one. Perchance that is also when the categorisation of essential vs accidental complexity becomes more ambiguous in the human process.