The other problem with "You are overcomplicating this" is the underlying confidence of the speaker that they know more about the problem domain than the address

The other problem with "You are overcomplicating this" is the underlying confidence of the speaker that they know more about the problem domain than the addressee. Not infrequently, the addressee has engaged with the problem longer and thus is aware of complications that need to be addressed. It's the situation described in the xkcd "Physicists" episode: https://www.xkcd.com/793/ https://www.xkcd.com/793/ My preference is to restate this as a question: "Is there any reason why we can't just do <X>?". Sometimes the response I got was: "Hmm, you're right, that had not occurred to me", sometimes it was "Yes, we need to handle <Y> and <Z>".