[Fester]

Web development complexity mentioned here is just a reflection of a complexity of the outer world. Activities you perform throughout the day require you to make choises which in it's turn requires knowledge gathered during one's life. Yes, you can't be an 'average Joe' to build a web application, but you can't be the same Joe to build a motorcycle or go rafting or found a glass factory without a (impressive amount of) domain specific knowledge.

World is complex. Technologies are. Deal with it.

Another thing that seriously bugs me is the approach to mask completely different goals and processes by imaginary simplicity of overlaying technology stack. Writing a web app and making it scale are totally different goals, choose what are you going to do first. Textual documents storage will differ from video hosting by a couple of orders of magnitude. The more generalization you achieve, the less freedom you'll have.