I find that the question of "whether simpler" is summed up in the aphorism "it's easy to get wrong answers infinitely fast". Where software gets out of control

I find that the question of "whether simpler" is summed up in the aphorism "it's easy to get wrong answers infinitely fast". Where software gets out of control really quickly is wherever you start to express a thing that is not essentially true on its own premises, and requires the introduction of a great number of assumptions. Commercial software falls into this pit unthinkingly since the business requirements create all kinds of assumptions: "it needs to support as many languages as possible" or "it needs to have calendar features" or "it needs to be compatible with this other system" are three super common ones that can create huge dependencies. So our software deviates from "truth" in some respect to get the job done of being presentable to other humans and doing the thing they expect. At every layer of our current systems, we have little Swiss Army Knife components that can be set up to do anything to resolve these kinds of issues, which means that they do all of it somewhat poorly. Old software is often more like a chainsaw - it doesn't have much to configure, so it's inadmissable for a larger spectrum of tasks, but the thing it does, it does quickly. Long run, though, I believe that true software crowds out false, even if there's a short-term advantage in getting the market to adopt something that does everything poorly and mostly serves the business, the next phase of that is a flight to quality, which currently manifests as everyone depending on some unmaintained open source code that works and does the job.