[lausobo]

There are many things that we do or could do to make the ssential complexity more manageable.

Something that we do already is abstract away parts of the essential complexity (CRUD, entities, validations, etc) where you have DSLs to specify that essential complexity.

But there are many other things we could as well, like some sort of ontological autocomplete that would help you specify your business model (a User may have these fields, a “Sale” is better represented as a “Transaction” in order to handle returns)

Moreover, re the Facebook App example, the ease of creation vs control is a false dichotomy. A page builder of sorts could spit a predefined design (to have something working ASAP) but there is no reason you couldn’t customize completely to your liking, as if no page builder was used. In other words, having a working app ASAP by using defaults, in order to aid requirement discovery, should be a feature or programming environments/tools/libraries framewors and not an either-or.