It still surprises me that moving a lever to extend or retract gear makes an
aircraft complex. An autopilot or GPS is a lot more complex than a gear
lever.

Its called 'pilot workload'.

In a real aircraft, you must:
-Fly the Plane
-Operate The Aircraft Systems
-Keep track of your current location
-Communicate with ATC
-Keep Watch for Traffic
-Plan your future track (or reference your flightplan), this includes
making absolutely sure you remain clear of all restricted airspace.

All in a reasonably loud, chaotic setting, with absolutely no option
to 'pause'...

Your sim covers 1 and 2 well... 3 and 6 ok (The various ways that
simulators try and 'trick you up' navigation wise are very poor
approximations of the real situations that come up... and restricted
airspace is a non-issue). and 4 and 5 are jokes (pressing an
'acknowledge' button gives you absolutely no sense of how critical it
is to keep constant track of ATC's dealings with the other aircraft
around you... whose transmitters are 1960s vacuum tube technology and
who all have different accents/ways of talking and traffic scanning on
a monitor is nearly impossible)...

So basically, in your little flight simulator, you are dealing with
MAYBE half of the 'real-world' pilot workload... AND you have a pause
when you get overwhelmed...

Aircraft Systems (but not avionix) dictate an aircraft's complexity
simply because those are the aspects of flying that the pilot cannot
time-shift, cannot get away from, and who knows what else he'll need
to be doing at the time. The complexity of an aircraft has nothing to
do with its 'mean' level of pilot involvement, its the potential
'worse-case' level of pilot involvement (low on fuel, landing in the
dark at an unknown towered airport, for example) that dictates it
because there simply is no option for the pilot workload to exceed his
capabilities at any point during the flight- the results would be
fatal.

Of course, you would know this if you had ever actually sat in a
cockpit, instead of trying to tell us that we're incompetent because
your little simulation (no matter how accurate it is at covering what
it does) simply does not take into account the full range of
experiences and requirements placed on a pilot...

But I guess its my problem now because I'm bothering to respond.