Asking web dev to be less complex is like asking financial markets to be simpler. Websites are market tools, tools have to retain a competitive edge. You can't afford to ignore market trends. You can't afford to wait until everything is well-defined. You can't let craftsmanship get in the way of shipping.
You can buck the rules yourself and operate on whichever side of the tradeoff you want to operate in, but you can't expect everybody else to follow the same rules you do.
I mean, if you don't like the web, then by all means find a different domain. I personally love it, and find it absolutely fascinating. With the right tools, (Rails) the complexity is manageable.
Which isn't to say that the crap mountain wasn't the best choice. It may very well be the pragmatic choice. The highest net benefit choice. But I don't believe it's intrinsic. I don't believe it has to be this way. Which means it's at least worth considering alternate paths. Even if in the end we picked the same way.
I work in video games. Currently working in VR. Where you absolutely must hit 90fps and never drop a frame. A certain degree of craftsmanship is required to ship. Layers and layers of abstraction on abstraction need not apply.
If you want to produce compelling VR experiences then I'd recommend you download Unity. You should be able to start making real, valid prototypes for different types of VR interactions in under a week.
If you want to graphics then I might recommend you poke at http://humus.name/index.php?page=3D or https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx. But graphics isn't my specialty so my thoughts aren't the strongest.
If you want to learn C++ then... that's an interesting question I've not thought of before. Maybe I'd start with "Learn C the Hard Way"? http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ I'm not as much of a C fanboy/C++ hater as other game devs. I quite like C++11 lambdas and move semantics. But I hate boost and it's ilk. So starting with C and later adding a dash of C++ seems like a good way to start.
I built my first website in 1994. I know the right tools. Rails is not one of them.
It's been a while since I did GUI programming on the desktop, but I remember it being so complex to build cross-platform applications that rolling your own cross-platform abstraction would be downright ludicrous.
I think the parent commenters point is correct. People treat the web like it should be easy, like it should just be HTML, but its not. It's full of legacy stuff, it requires working on multiple "platforms" (browsers), it runs on all kinds of device sizes and shapes, and the applications being written for it are no longer trivial.
1) Broken platforms. How much "innovation" has occurred in javascript to compensate for a broken execution model? How much caching does your average rails app do because of the poor concurrency the the Ruby platform, requiring external services for persistence across requests?
2) Looking for challenging problems. Design patterns are often a solution to a meta problem. Building a CRUD app, there aren't too many hard domain. However, code maintenance is a hard problem. It involves many people using subjective judgement. So as a somewhat bored developer, I'm going to try to solve the meta problem.
It sort of pains me to see how much engineering effort has gone into essentially making broken systems more performant and maintainable.
Isn't that part of the problem? Webdev is complex. But it feels to me like it's been overcomplicated by a factor of 100. It doesn't have to be.