Michael Krigsman has been humming the "simplicity is good / complexity is ... not so good" tune lately - check out this and this - and it sounds pretty good to me. While his focus is primarily on self-induced organizational complexity, I think the same exact points apply to architectural complexity.

In fact, this is how I tend to describe the abstraction presented by an application fabric:

each service and application scales as needed, always work as expected, and manages itself.

Makes sense, doesn't it?

In practice, the only people who actually like architectural complexity either

1. don't think they have any choice,
2. don't have to code for or operate the resulting apps,
3. are so far down into the bowels of the existing, uber-complex architectures that they've forgotten that there is a world above-ground that is their natural home, or
4. are just trying to show off.

While Todd Fast of Sun makes an interesting point against a sort of "false simplicity", I think that is really a different issue and a bit of a red-herring (which I'll take up again later).

For my part, I'll choose architectural simplicity each and every time!

Note: the image is from the cover of a great book, "The Evidential Power of Beauty" by Thomas Dubay, which explores the meaning of simplicity and beauty in the physical world.