I wasn't trying to say 4e lacks complexity; I totally agree that it's a complex game. I just don't understand why "I have to remember to add a handful of temporary bonuses/penalties" is the reason people call 4e a complex game.
At least in my experience, the complexity consists mostly in memorising the triggering conditions - triggering conditions for application of conditions, for removal of conditions (E/S of whose turn?, or on a save?), for bonuses and penalties (eg prone gives certain attacks a bonus and certain other attacks a penalty; blindness effects melee and ranged attacks, but not AoEs, except for fighter AoEs which are stated to affect
visible enemies).
AD&D has nothing like as complex as that - Gygax's DMG doesn't make it
easy to find, say, all the combat modifiers, but once you have them written down in a list they're fairly easy to apply.
From my 4e experience, in play, 4e could become, very quickly, incredibly complex. And quite arguably pretty tedious as well. By the end of the first round of combat, it wasn't unusual for an enemy to have between 6-9 status effects on it. That's insane.
Six to nine effects is a lot, but not (in my experience, at least) insane. A fairly common suite of conditions in my game might be (say)
marked,
quarried,
dazed,
prone and
blind. It would be rare to go above five effects, but not unheard of. In my group, it's not that hard to get (say)
immobilised and/or
slowed on there as well; and then of course there's
bloodied.
We use coloured tokens placed on or beneath the monster's own token/counter. Whether that's a plus or a minus for tedium is perhaps a matter of opinion! I wouldn't say it reduces the complexity, though - it is just a way of encoding/expressing it.
For me, the 4e approach is preferable to hit point attrition as the be-all and end-all of combat. I wouldn't expect that to be a universal opinion.