For some reason I intuited that you were not going to talk about how well the organization has dealt with said complexity. I'm curious if there is any way to FFI into sharepoint and start using tools that don't actively sabotage their users.
This is why I thank the stars that I am the opensource developer, focusing on linux / Python / Django development. I cross over into SharePoint only when we begrudgingly use it as a CMS for a windows 8 app or similar.
There is an effort now to write an external service bus to manage a lot of the business logic complexity that we've baked into SharePoint. With the eventual goal of having SharePoint and other resources leverage this SB and use it instead.
Its marginally less of a total failure for issue tracking than Excel.
I'm not sure that that counts as something nice.
(For the omg-cryptic-markup crowd there is always Google Docs. I seriously wonder why that hasn't crushed all trivial Sharepoint instances yet.)