[dasil003]

I think it's a boiling frog scenario. AWS's goal is marketshare, not simplicity. Like many professional software products, it started simple by necessity and then grew more complex over time. In AWS's case it ballooned pretty quickly due to the compelling nature of fully-managed on-demand infra services and the huge amount of resources Amazon poured into it.

The value add for not having to directly interact with hardware is still pretty high, but you definitely pay a price (in addition to the sticker price) for it in terms non-transferable vendor-specific knowledge.