I think you may be right about the lamplight fallacy. I just started learning Mandarin this year. It's somewhat famous for having a simple grammar, but that in

I think you may be right about the lamplight fallacy. I just started learning Mandarin this year. It's somewhat famous for having a simple grammar, but that in no way means that it has lesser expressive capacity. It just means that the language has evolved different ways of expressing the same ideas. They don't happen to be ways that can easily be summarized as grammatical rules. But I'm not sure I'd take that to mean that it's a simpler language. I think it probably says more about the concept of grammar as defined by grammarians.