these sorts of projects have a way of becoming extremely complex extremely fast
It's "becoming extremely complex extremely fast" because that's what you turned it into, idiot.
I miss the days of simple design and efficient, concise code. Take the UNIXv6 utilities for example. What programmers back then could write in a few hundred lines and less than a dozen functions now takes thousands of lines and several dozen classes with a ton of methods in each, all linked to some huge "framework" that itself is full of useless shit.