Applied XML DevCon Summaries
Rory's writeups are reasonably detailed and worth several snickers.
There's a meme I've seen with increasing frequency surrounding the nEcho/RSS debates and
Rory reports the Dave Winer repeated it at XmlDevCon: "Developers love complexity."
Right. And all people who generalize are idiots. Therefore, Napoleon was a Frenchman.
Some developers identify more complexity with more desirable. No doubt. I've seen their code. I've also seen developers whose work eschews complexity. For my money, it's a naive generalization to say "developers love complexity"; it's a neat sound bite but it presumes to know far too much about something so large as to be unknowable.
Freed of other constraints, I believe developers, engineers, architects--whatever you want to call them--trend towards efficient solutions. Good developers know how to refine efficient solutions towards solutions. Lesser developers can't do this or haven't mastered the art of doing so yet. There's a lot of folks in between who are inconsistent in their ability to do so. Throw in the real world and its myriad constraints and you can see how it is that efficient solutions aren't refactored to a desirable level of simplicity.
Surely, there are reasons behind needless complexity. I don't personally believe it has much if anything at all to do with developers loving complexity. Simple code is easier to use, engineers recognize the objective value inherent in simplification. Being able to get to that place or having the time to travel that way, those are more basic issues standing between simple solutions and the cruft of the world.