Google, Microsoft, Apple and even Firefox have an incentive to reduce competition by making the web as complex as possible. If the web is to be free, it must be radically simplified. To call that a lost cause is just a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I don't disagree (although I'd be curious to hear your rationale on Mozilla; their incentives are... curious). I suppose what's hard to not view as a lost cause is the idea that accessibility to non-JS/Lynx/etc is best-practice or the default. But there are counter-examples of less-is-more good citizens (Craigslist and HN itself come to mind).

As flawed as browsers (and their vendors) may be, I come at it from the other direction: from the perspective of end-user adoption, the open web and federated email are our last two bastions of open computing ecosystems of any kind, holding back the tide of walled-garden apps and clouds and such from taking over completely. While radically-simple "good citizens" of the open web may not be the norm, at least they're possible, which can't exactly be said for the computer-as-appliance model.