My two cents. @Dantheman Dan Larimer has been behind this platform and others in the past. Bitshares, Keyhotee and others. He's one for mapping out a system in tremendous detail well before coding begins. Way before launch or a testnet he's working out as a thought experiment how to prevent certain abuses as well as incentivize users to be good actors.
Once launched the systems he's designed keep evolving to streamline the real world usage and abuse the systems see in practice.
Consequently there's a lot of machinery under the hood. I wouldn't accuse him of making things overly complicated intentionally but he seems to give a lot of credit to the average person who wants to attempt to understand all these intricacies.
It's my opinion that Dan Larimer is a tremendous genius. That said he's struggled in his system designs keeping anything on a level somebody new has any chance to grok within say 15 minutes. Maybe even 5 hours.
Steemit is fortunately a very clean and simple front end for what turns out to be some devilishly complicated back end. It's great for the newbie that they are sheltered from so much of the behind the scenes workings. But when it comes down to it people see a dollar amount on their posts and they might wonder how that's to be awarded. Thus the complexities surface as you discover the various tokens which accomplish different things to keep the value proposition of the system as a whole chugging along.