I also loved the spiral bound notebook and in grade school I loved reading unearthed arcana, familiarizing myself with every obscure rule of AD&D. But I think @Ontarah is right -- even if I would put their point in different terms.
The problem with PoE was not the complexity but the way it was complex. It was a game for people who like things like baseball stats and fantasy sports teams lineups. In BG2 I knew what it meant to have a sword that was +1 against most enemies but +4 vs undead. I was even had an understanding of the sword's weapon speed and reach. It was a complex system but the complexity was kewl -- once I got it it felt like I had access to arcane information.
In PoE I needed the back of an envelope to calculate whether it was better to use sword X with its 9 percent increase likelihood to hit vs sword Y with its relatively small 2 percent likelihood to hit but that 2 percent stacks up each round it doesn't hit up to a maximum of 15 percent but then resets to 2 upon either a successful hit or a miss at 15 percent. And if you enjoy that, you enjoy that. But, for me, it interfered with immersion, the player never has an intuitive sense of what their weapon is going to do. It's a game for people who see video game battles as a form of hypothesis testing.
Which isn't to say that I don't have the greatest respect for J.E. Sawyer -- guy is real geek who really gets into this stuff. But I only agree with him about 70 percent of time. PoE was game made the way JE said a game should be made. And that 30 percent disagreement came out. PoE was overly balanced, overly battle oriented and it was a chore to grind through those trash mobs.
(but brilliant plot and the latest turn based version of the PoE engine is really pretty good -- I'd like to see it used on BG4)
