This has been a popular point lately. I wonder if it is a reflection of our current tool set around architecture and design. It seems realistic that implementing a "simple" new feature should not be inordinately costly, I don't dare to claim it should be a one to one relationship, but the current ratio seems out of control.

I believe as the software industry increases it's understanding of architectural design that we will learn to add most types of features, in a systematically less costly way. Making them easier to maintain,update, and detangle from the rest of the software.

In fact, I am finding that we are just now arriving at that point with functional languages. Not that functional is our savior, but it does provide a good set of tools for this particular problem.

To wrap this up, I don't think software needs less code and less features. I think it needs better tools and methodologies with which to deal with creating, updating, and maintaining features and complexity.