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I have concluded that it is intentional to make something simple complex. What better way to control people as they become adults.

I’m not sure I agree with your sinister conclusion, although I do grant the possibility. Math teachers, as a group, for a long time have pushed to change the effective methods used to teach math concepts. Why? I think it is because math teachers as a group have always been good at math and found that the traditional methods stifled their attempts to figure out how and why math works the way it does. So they want all students to learn the way they did—discovering the patterns and flow of math on their own. They find rote memorization of facts and formulae gets in the way. It’s natural for them to think that way, but they are wrong.

Problem with that is, that the vast majority of humans don’t need or want to view math the way they do. They just want math as a tool to solve problems and, in my opinion rote memorization is the best way for most people to achieve that.

I got into teaching during the ‘New Math’ era of the late 60s/early 70s. I was supposed to teach 4th graders how to solve problems in base 6. It was a complete waste of everyone’s time. But we were pretty much forbidden to make them remember their times tables. It goes on today. Roughly half of the 8th graders I sub with require calculators to do problems like 8 x 7. If calculators are forbidden, they’ll either add eight seven times (and get it wrong half the time) or start working their fingers.