[onion2k]

When I hear that Magento is "too complicated," I have to ask, then why doesn't something similar take its place?

That makes an assumption that the complexity involved is necessary. The alternative to Magento isn't a product that does everything Magento can do but with a simpler codebase, but instead is a more specialised product that doesn't include the features of Magento that you don't need.

The complexity of Magento stems from the fact it does everything you could possibly want but ignores the fact that most (like, 99%) stores don't want or need everything. A simple ecommerce site that sells 10 virtual products has to have the same feature set as a fully-featured online store with 1000s of real products, templates that change based on dates, multiple variations of items, weight-based shipping calculation and so on. That's what bugs me about it. I want to be able to make a custom build that only includes the things I actually need.

Also, consider this - the internet is full of articles, blog posts, and Stackoverflow questions that are about "Magento". Authors are rarely explicit about the version number. A lot of the difficulty in learning how to use Magento well is that as a developer I have to look at the date something was posted and approximate whether or not the advice is applicable to what I'm working with. Perhaps this is something you can address as Chief Evangelist - ask authors to take care to say what version their posts are about, and to revisit old articles to update them when Magento changes, or to deprecate posts about versions that are out-of-date.

(Note: This is based on M1. I've tinkered with M2 but haven't yet deployed anything on it yet. Hopefully my concerns have been addressed.)