[LandR]

Often times the developers moaning about complex code basically learned if statements and for loops and then were done learning.

But we still have to write code that these people understand. It makes no damn sense.

Sometimes, sure, people write horribly complex code, but sometimes it's just developers who have stopped learning. They see something that isn't immediately familiar and discard it as too complex and make no attempt at trying to learn.

What I don't get is why we have to pander to these people.

[throwaway894345]

This is a mischaracterization. We write simple code not for simple people, but because grokking gratuitously abstract code isn't a good use of anyone's cognitive resources--no matter how smart you are, you will have more mental capacity to put toward real problems if you're working in a simple codebase rather than an unnecessarily abstract codebase.