It's a big jump to go from "this protocol is more complicated than the previous one" to "cut out future generations from system programming". It's not _that much_ more complicated that a competent programmer who's familiar with sockets and bytes can't ever accomplish it.

As discussed at length in another sub-thread here, the complexity solves real problems, it's not for its own sake. But if you're not convinced of that, nothing I say here is going to change that.

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If you've worked with me, you'd know that I take simplicity as a virtue to an extent that's almost detrimental to getting stuff done. I despise complexity for its own sake. I wish as much as anyone that we could start over and redesign IP, TCP, TLS, HTTP, HTML, JS, and a few more things, with all our accumulated knowledge, into a simple and clean application and content distribution system that's easy to understand and observe. But path dependence :( We have to work with what we've got.

It's the picking out of HTTP 1.1 as some sort of golden age of clean and simple and observable that bothers me. It isn't.