> Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides[...]
I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach.
What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start going deeper and reach more specific conclusions.
Even if you can reach a more specific conclusion, that wouldn't necessarily rule out complexity as the cause of failure.
It's a question of how far you zoom in or out.
In the micro-level you can find the particular bug that causes failure, while on the macro-level it's still complexity that's causing failure (because it causes bugs like that to occur more frequently).
I think the spirit of the original statement is exactly that: complexity is the cause of failure is an awful conclusion to reach.
What you're saying sounds like you think it's a good first intuition to start going deeper and reach more specific conclusions.