Elegance is an engineering trope. But perhaps by now, it's just convenient. Engineering has gotten very good at managing complexity. See production machines li

Elegance is an engineering trope. But perhaps by now, it's just convenient. Engineering has gotten very good at managing complexity. See production machines like stealth fighters, relay-and-rotor-age pinball machines, military submarines, navigation or gunnery mechanical calculators, large construction projects... Some generations of CPUs are elegant in their return to first principles while others throw in everything but the kitchen sink in an unholy mess; Mainframe manufacturing is a gorgeous history of containing and organizing chaos. Fusion research machines are very complex, yes, but by this point... it's only so much of an obstacle. We might be tempted to throw in software ... Eh, perhaps we are not all that good with that yet. I mean, plenty of complexity, but not yet all that much "managed complexity".