Complexity for simplicity's sake

This will be a quick one. So as I mentioned a while ago, I'm working on some top-secret butter-sauce magic internal projects here at Exit 31. This is far and away the most R&D I've had to pour over, but I'm sure it'll be worth it. But you know, the further I get along, the more I encounter the same issue:

This thing is complicated.

Not just that, but there is A LOT of great tech out there that I'm really split on. I'm looking to use a few frameworks for the different languages on the back-end, and I've progressively migrated from none to simple to complicated. I had started thinking CakePHP was the way, but after some more research decided to look more into Zend because of their recent work with Adobe and great (though super expensive) IDE, Zend Studio, built on the Eclipse platform. I also have always been a big Mootools fan, but now I'm torn between it and Prototype/Scriptaculous because of Zend's native support for those frameworks in it's AJAX libraries.

Well, the goal was to make it extensible and modular so I can add/change/remove easier. Here's hoping all this will make it easier and not face-mangling in the end. Face-mangling. Ouch.

I just want to get back to the days when the words Web and 2.0 (is that a word?) were never married. Maybe I'll start the Web 3.0 revolution, which will be a mass-reverting to non-standard jumbled mark-up. Yes...