I want to second this. The things I wrote throughout my career that I'm most proud of aren't very complex.
I find it very satisfying to understand a problem so well, up to the point you can find a simple and elegant solution to it. It makes the solution easier to reason about with other team members, and easier for the team to maintain it later.
I see this as making your domain expertise available as a framework for the other team members.
This is my idea of sophistication in the software development world.
Simplicity is always a sign of a quality solution. I’m not sure why anybody would ever conflate complexity with quality or sophistication. I wrote some very complex code in college, but it wasn’t very high quality.
To date, my most complex piece of software in terms of how it was implemented was a simple calculator written in my first programming course. About a week before I started it, I had learned about regular expressions (the programming construct, not the formal language construct).
The basic implementation was a calculator that could add, sub, mul, div, pow, and sqrt. Bonus points were awarded for adding additional functionality including lettered variables. It started with a relatively clean shunting-yard implementation, but my use of regular expressions quickly fixed that.
My calculator worked under most circumstances, but that thing is an eye sore. I'll never get rid of that source code. I like to go back and look a few key pieces of software I've written through the years.
I find it very satisfying to understand a problem so well, up to the point you can find a simple and elegant solution to it. It makes the solution easier to reason about with other team members, and easier for the team to maintain it later. I see this as making your domain expertise available as a framework for the other team members.
This is my idea of sophistication in the software development world.