I personally use Exim. The developers of both have collaborated as required with each other in the past over certain issues and both projects are very mature. They are rather different beasts and there are loads of articles out there comparing them.
For the most part postfix/dovecot have become the default for full scale mail servers but back when the Debian defaults were decided there was still some uncertainty about what would replace sendmailNG as the lightweight default mta.
They are both mail-trasport daemons (basically mail relays).
dovecot is comparable to Cyrus, it's not a mail relay, it's POP/IMAP server used for accessing mail from storage.
You might have the two reversed?
I don't have hands-on experience with Exim, but every "getting started with email" document on the internet seems to recommend Postfix as easier for a beginner to install.
In fact, as an old hand (been dealing with exim configs since 2001), the very first thing I did and still do is delete the default debian hell and copy-paste a simple two-screen config which then needs only 3-4 lines tweaked.
Postfix has a high learning curve; the master.cf vs main.cf and the "chaining" of email filters (milters) is a lot more of a hurdle than exims comparatively simple configuration.
The issue is mostly that postfix is installed by default more places, so it's the default, much like sendmail was. And that setting up an MTA is quite difficult anyway.
It's basically an accident of history. But both are fine in their own right, neither is inferior to the other, just trade offs.
But I wouldn't call it complicated, not really. Expansions usually bite, but it had a REPL-like facility for getting them right since forever. The rest is pretty nice and clean DSL in my opinion.
Though not for RedHat or Ubuntu, both use postfix.
Please don’t down vote me for an obvious statement, but I do feel the maturity of Political discourse was brought to the school playground level with the election in 2016.
I'm still using exim, but not for any specific reason. It's just what I used in the beginning and I never had a reason to change.