That's a good observation. This also makes me wonder if one key reason why Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu didn't take off was because it was too complex from the start?
It was definitely the case with the Semantic Web: a much greater up-front investment with only hypothesized pay-offs down the road. Making simple things hard is rarely going to be a popular choice.
I would argue yes, that it’s a good success story: it took a welter of init scripts, supervisors, logging, event-triggered notification systems, configuration conventions, etc. and provided a single standard mechanism which is easier to work with than any one of those was on its own much less the number of combinations most systems have.
