My thoughts, exactly. When I was a programmer, I used to get into arguments with the geeks who absolutely LOVED the complexity of their code and applications. I told them basically the same thing you say and more often than not, was looked upon as a heretic.
When I learned COBOL in 1982, it was all about maintainable code. I used to love rewriting programs. It finally paid off when I rewrote the local long distance toll rating program for UsWest (now Quest). I reduced it from 10,500 lines to 5,600 lines and found four or five production errors that they knew existed but couldn’t find. They didn’t even know what program was causing them
I’ve not been a developer for about 15 years now (business analyst now), but I work with developers a lot. Apparently structured code has fallen out of favor these days. It’s all about getting it done via Agile, a chunk at a time.