Pedant mode on but… I think I was saying, if you don’t even try, you can’t even fail either.
Cas 
Sure. And your position of telling people getting off their bums and coding stuff (even if in the stupidest way possible) rather than getting mired down in minutia is good advice. Only with a moderate amount of experience can you start to get a feel for when complexity is truly needed.
I don’t think I’ll ever figure it out, myself. I’ve been doing it for over 30 years now and I still can’t get the balance right.
Cas
My thinking is that you’re an expert programmer if you fit into either of these conditions:
- You’ve forgotten more about CS than you currently know.
- You realize that you’ll never know all that much.
And nobody probably ever will, there are simply too many conflicting interests to ever get to a point where you can follow the mighty rule of “thou shalt engineer software”. Conflicts of interest, changing requirements, money, deadlines- they all kill proper software engineering. And those murderers are always lurking, no matter what project you do.