I recently read a blog by Roy Fielding on REST. Deep, in one of the comments, Fielding says:

[…] I think most people just make the mistake that it should be simple to design simple things. In reality, the effort required to design something is inversely proportional to the simplicity of the result.

People who saw many good and bad designs relate to this. But it is not acknowledged in day-to-day life, on the contrary:

• Many integration solutions are overly complex because people just don’t appreciate how much (high quality) work goes into designing a simple/elegant solution;
• (Junior) architects do not appreciate the beauty of a simple solution. They will over-engineer the solution creating more adaptation layers between systems with no benefit, interfaces too generic loosing all the advantages of strong type checking
• It is hard to win the argument in an architecture meeting suggesting a simpler solution as if that shows a lack of knowledge rather than a honed skill.

Fielding’s quote should be on the first page of software design books.