No, that's missing Rich's point - "complexity and cardinality are orthogonal".

AFAICT, Leiningen is the living proof that you can build an all-encompassing architecture without renouncing to simplicity.

Okay, yes, that contradicts what I said.

And maybe this stuff will become the new atoms that we build applications out of, and I'm just balking at all the unfamiliarity. I can't be sure, but initial impression is that they are not that - that they're just too oddly shaped to be generally useful.

Today, though, Rich's keynote was about the necessity of the restriction of choice to allow creativity to be possible. I don't know how to integrate that idea with the idea that very large cardinality isn't a problem. (Some of his examples of bad design were pieces of hardware with too many knobs or inputs)

For the record, my initial impression about Pedestal isn't particularly positive either. But I don't think one can judge its complexity only in terms of familiarity.

Probably the problem with "too many knobs" isn't the cardinality itself (how many is too many?), but that it typically is a sign that the designer hasn't realised the commonality and composability of the knobs/features.