[bell-cot]

Gatekeeping, or self-promotion? You don't get investors/patents/promotions/tenure by making your knowledge or results sound simple and understandable.

[master-lincoln]

Is that really the case or are you just assuming so? Seems counter-intuitive to me.

[segfaultex]

Why not both? And that's a good point, there are a LOT of incentives to make things arbitrarily complex in a variety of fields.