This reminds me of an excellent chapter in "Software Design Philosophy" by John Ousterhout about complexity- I think he names this accidental complexity.

It put a finder on an itch I had: that we tend to overly complicate solutions to a degree where we can't handle systems that combine these solutions as our brain can't hold all overly complex solutions...

In my opinion maintainability of software is by far the most important goal in production type software!