[m_fayer]

It sounds like what he's actually arguing for is cohesion, not just simplicity. And if that's the case, I'm with him.

Cohesion is achieved when the degree of complexity is determined by both domain and audience, so Photoshop's relative complexity and Pixelmator's relative simplicity are both fine - in each case the domain is satisfactorily handled for the needs of the respective audience. They're both cohesive tools. Now if Photoshop decided to throw in a chat client (hello gmail), we'd be having a different conversation.

However, if the author is actually advocating breaking up Photoshop into a thousand pluggable little tools that everyone would have to piecemeal assemble into some sort of shared "workspace," that's where we (and most non-geeks) part company.