"But when you add them all together, you end up with a terribly laggy affair" I think this is the key. People fall in love with simple systems which solves a

"But when you add them all together, you end up with a terribly laggy affair" I think this is the key. People fall in love with simple systems which solves a problem. Being totally in honey moon they want to use those systems for additional use cases. So they build stuff around it, atop of it, abstract the original system to allow growth for more complexity. Then the system becomes too complex, so people might come up with a new idea. So they create a new simple system just to fix a part of the whole stack and allow migration from the old one. The party starts all over again. But it's like hard drive fragmentation - at some point there are so many layers that it's basically impossible to recombine layers again. Everybody fears complexity already built.