The "good" answer for why terms of use and contracts are written more complexly is because they encode more complex information, that is less subject to varying

The "good" answer for why terms of use and contracts are written more complexly is because they encode more complex information, that is less subject to varying interpretations. Though certainly there is a 'pattern' to these that I think lawyers just fall back into that can be less understandable than needed. If nothing else, many contracts are written in a somewhat weird frame, where one party is referred to in third person, and the other in second person. And often phrasing is so that the second person needs to recognize a claim of the third person ("you acknowledge etc etc"). In many ways, contracts are like the ultimate reversal of YAGNI. Imagine deploying code that you literally could not fix after release, and you knew that nearly all deviations from intended behavior would just kick you in the butt. Your code (and general product function) would probably get a bit weird too.