"The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay." — Tony Hoare
It is impossible in practice to persuade people to pay the same amount for a simple, reliable product that they would pay for a complex, unreliable one with more features. Reliability is a promise, and they have to trust. Features can be demonstrated now, so less trust is involved (or so it appears).
Depends on who your customers are. I have always found breaking up features into a "basic" user and a super user is a fairly good approach. Keep the advanced and complex things on a separate page that requires navigation and keep the 80% use case as the sane default given to most users. The loud few get what they want and the bulk of the users are served reasonably. I have also found consistency to be significantly more important than excellence. Any time someone requests that we take away an option or feature for some good reason I am extremely hesitant to remove as I am confident that a customer will suddenly provide a valid use case for it's existence.
I thought the noveau semi-riche liked complex flashy things, while properly wealthy people tended more towards ultra-high-quality but simple and classy?
It's definitely not impossible to do that, there are a ton of people (on this very website, I dare say) who'd pay good money for a non-smart TV with the latest panel technology and 4 HDMI ports.
However Samsung and LG wouldn't make as much money from those models, and the potential customers for them will probably suck it up and buy a smart TV anyway. So why would they bother?
Been there, done that! Then got married. Wife not appreciative of no-TV lifestyle, and no-wife lifestyle is slightly too big a sacrifice for simplicity.
It is impossible in practice to persuade people to pay the same amount for a simple, reliable product that they would pay for a complex, unreliable one with more features. Reliability is a promise, and they have to trust. Features can be demonstrated now, so less trust is involved (or so it appears).
And then the features stop working.