My point is that the problem with complexity fetishism is that one adds complexity where none is necessary simply because one enjoys the complexity. That's fine for a game, but our industry is very often doing it at work with products that are ostensibly meant to make people's lives better.

"then look at all of the over engineering, the layers upon layers of abstraction, the obsessive need to keep making software larger and more complicated only to eventually tear it down and rebuild the exact same thing with the new-hotness widgets"

That could be a sane evolutionary process. I'm not saying it is, of course there are problems with the tech industry, but this process of exploring a space of possibilities with the tools you have, then breaking them down and building up a better suited set of tools from the ground up doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.

Maybe what I mean is, what makes you think the game is unnecessarily complex? Playing it, I was always amazed with how you become capable of achieving more and more with less and less time and effort as the game goes on. I don't see that it is made artificially more complex, it seemed like there was a lot of effort put into making the emergent complexity manageable at larger and larger scales.

- The vast majority of products you create are never actually employed to do anything and are instead thrown into a blender to make science-goo, arbitrary amounts of which are required to unlock new stuff that is also mostly destined for the blender.

- Bots are introduced way too late in the game, forcing the player to manage the rapidly increasing complexity of their infrastructure manually for a large portion of it.

- Power distribution is a tedious non-problem you're forced to keep solving, again manually most of the time because bots come so late in the game.

To name a few. The natural argument here is that those things are required to motivate the player to make their automation faster and more efficient to progress the game, but the point is that they feel needlessly arbitrary. In a game like Subnautica, for instance, there are some big high-resource things you have to build with reasonably deep critical paths, but they are things you actually use instead of just melting them down to increase a number somewhere. They feel necessary, science-slurry doesn't.

Players also claim that yeah, that's all true, but the real game doesn't start until after you've researched everything and launched your first rocket anyway. Meaning all of that is essentially a 40 hour tutorial.

Added complexity isnt always bad. It's just that abstraction is indeed a very, very hard thing to be done. Powerful features will be complex.

Take browser as example, it's a form of abstraction (imo, it's an abstraction done right). It abstract the http communication in form of html and represent as gui. Browsers are indeed, very, very complex.