You see the same thing in machine learning research papers as well.
Many people start attacking a problem by deploying the most sophisticated method possible with the belief that it will lead to the best results. I believe it might be better to chisel away at the complexity and find the simplest possible combination that expresses the key ideas. 
Michelangelo was asked about the difficulties that he must have encountered in sculpting his masterpiece. His reply: "It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David."
Back to finance story: you used to see all these people buy the most sophisticated, exotic, financial derivatives to speculate on the markets. They ultimately lost their shirts during the financial crisis. They should've simply went long or short the asset they had interested in.
But what most don't know is that that the people who sold these, who were often highly educated mathematicians or physicists, and who deployed the most sophisticated hedging technology by calculating 3rd order derivatives to rebalance their books, had also lost their shirts too.
The best traders I met, and those who survived and thrived in such chaotic times, were those who saw the big picture and strategically placed large, simple hedges in the market against the toxic positions they were tasked to manage. They ignored derivatives to manage derivatives.
