[arctangent]

Fred Brooks said [1] that there are two types of complexity, accidental and essential. While accidental complexity can be reduced the theory is that the essential complexity cannot.

"Accidental complexity relates to problems which engineers create and can fix; for example, the details of writing and optimizing assembly code or the delays caused by batch processing. Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it; if users want a program to do 30 different things, then those 30 things are essential and the program must do those 30 different things."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

[kilre]

I guess the whole point of design or engineering for that matter is to get as close as possible to the bare minimum of essential complexity. Elegance comes to mind, if you are able to jump over several complexity traps.