I've had largely the same experience as you, but I have seen some hints that real simplicity could be possible. If the domain is technology itself, there may be

I've had largely the same experience as you, but I have seen some hints that real simplicity could be possible. If the domain is technology itself, there may be no underlying simplicity. Ultimately, I think we have to make a trade-off between simplicity and easiness. The approach I outlined would be incredibly expensive because the tooling for that approach isn't quite good enough yet, and stakeholders wouldn't even understand it. They wouldn't realize that you were building a pitch for your product not as a PowerPoint deck, but as executable code! A lot of our complexity today is from constructing software itself over layer upon layer of previous complex software (CSS, I'm looking at you), not due to the intrinsic "business cases" our software is meant to solve. Some of that complexity cannot be avoided, and some of it could be but at significant cost. To use an analogy, it's also cheaper to build a traffic light-controlled intersection, but overpasses are simpler. Coincidentally, almost all of the tools I've seen that try to make simplicity cheaper come either from the Scheme/Racket/Lisp world that Hickey himself hails from or from Alan Kay and his sphere of influence. (The two groups have quite a bit of overlap, both in terms of ideas and even people.)