[01100011]

Sometimes the complexity is unavoidable and you have to pick the lesser of many evils. Oftentimes complexity management is trying to model the system in such a way that the complexity moves to the area which is most easily understood. It doesn't make the system less complex, only easier to reason about and maintain. State-oriented design is just a (very powerful) tool in the toolbox.

Even when I haven't actually used a state machine, I've modelled problems as state machines just to help me think about the system. Thinking in terms of state can often help traditional software designs.

[empiricus]

I agree, we try to think in terms in state machine. Just complaining that somehow this is not good enough, in practice we need to add random flags, and it is not clear how to separate the multitude of separate state machines all active at the same time.