I wrote my thoughts up above, but will respond to this here. I agree, both about the short methods school and about programming dogmas in general.
I went through a couple years of working in the OO short method style. Recently an old client called me back to help modify some code I'd done for them in 2004, so I went down for an afternoon to help them out. I was really embarrassed. It was obvious to me that I had strung things together in endless chains of delegation (tiny classes and short methods) not because that was simple but because it, at the time, was my belief about programming. I got that belief from other programmers I admired.
The truth is that this is how most of us work all the time. I don't mean short methods; I mean picking a style based on our beliefs -- mostly for emotional reasons -- and then seeing the entire programming world through that filter. To be able to just see the problem is difficult when you're operating from one of these positions. Much (most?) of what we do in software development is add extrinsic complexity, which is bad when the problems themselves are hard to begin with.
My experience is that your moment of "the problem itself is actually very simple if you approach it in the right way" does eventually come, if you make getting there a high priority. But it's challenging. Most of the time we don't even know what our assumptions and beliefs are, let alone have the flexibility to adapt them to the problem. It's usually the other way around: we adapt the problem to our beliefs because they determine how we even see the problem in the first place.
I went through a couple years of working in the OO short method style. Recently an old client called me back to help modify some code I'd done for them in 2004, so I went down for an afternoon to help them out. I was really embarrassed. It was obvious to me that I had strung things together in endless chains of delegation (tiny classes and short methods) not because that was simple but because it, at the time, was my belief about programming. I got that belief from other programmers I admired.
The truth is that this is how most of us work all the time. I don't mean short methods; I mean picking a style based on our beliefs -- mostly for emotional reasons -- and then seeing the entire programming world through that filter. To be able to just see the problem is difficult when you're operating from one of these positions. Much (most?) of what we do in software development is add extrinsic complexity, which is bad when the problems themselves are hard to begin with.
My experience is that your moment of "the problem itself is actually very simple if you approach it in the right way" does eventually come, if you make getting there a high priority. But it's challenging. Most of the time we don't even know what our assumptions and beliefs are, let alone have the flexibility to adapt them to the problem. It's usually the other way around: we adapt the problem to our beliefs because they determine how we even see the problem in the first place.