Something Alan Kay has talked about multiple times is how sometimes raising the complexity of your building blocks slightly can reduce the overall complexity of

Something Alan Kay has talked about multiple times is how sometimes raising the complexity of your building blocks slightly can reduce the overall complexity of the system. He uses the example of modeling orbits with circles vs ellipses. Ellipses are more complex building blocks, but yield an overall much simpler model for how orbits work (not to mention the correct answer).