The system worked fine for 100 to 200 users, but as the user-base increased the system shutdown and became catatonic. It did not report any errors, but neither did it trigger any emails or pages. When it came time to write the second generation of this server, KISS was the design philosophy. The 11,000 lines of code became a few hundred. The amazing part is that the simple solution proved to be faster and more scalable.
Complexity does lead to a lot of code that is difficult to maintain.
For this reason, one of my favorite tools is the line count utility. One of the biggest fallacies in software development is the use of the line count tool to measure a programmer's productivity. Use of the tool to calculate productivity is often inaccurate. However, the line count tool is very accurate in measuring the complexity of an application. The higher the line count, the greater the complexity.