Perhaps the issue is conflating "complete" with "broad". D&D has always taken work on the part of the DM and players to make it anything broader than a dungeon adventure game -- even during the 2E days when adventures and supplments extolled intrigue and romance, the rules still supported dungeon delves the most (except the distinct lack of a dungeon section in the DMG -- which was odd). D&D, any edition, isn't "incomplete" because it has a particular focus, any more than Monopoly is incomplete because there are no rules for character advancement.
This is such a broad analysis that I don't think it gets us anywhere.
Let's try to avoid speaking in generalities.
I consider a rules set 'complete' if it contains every rule necessary for playing the game. This is what is normally meant by 'complete rules' when we speak of a board game, for example. For the purposes of RPG's, this is strictly impossible, so I would allow that an RPG rules set must and should exclude 'conventions of play' that would be part of the common knowledge of all players, such that a chair is something you sit on or that barring some special exception you can't walk through a wall. So, for the purposes of RPG's, it is sufficient for the RPG to describe itself sufficiently to describe all the things in its imagined gamespace that aren't part of the standard RPG 'conventions of play'.
Now, let's consider the D&D Basic set. You consider it complete because you could sit down and start playing the game using only the D&D Basic set, and in that sense you are right. However, I consider it incomplete for several reasons. The obvious reason I consider it incomplete is the existance of the Expert set. However, this isn't a sufficient reason in and of itself to consider the game incomplete. It could be that you have an imagined game world were no character exists which is over 3rd level. The trouble with this is that the designers of the game seemed to have alot of trouble desribing there imagined world within these contraints. In particular, right there in the D&D Basic set was the module, 'B2: Keep on the Borderlands', and in the module it described the existance of things not covered by the rules, like for example (IIRC) the Castellan was a 6th level fighter - impossible under the rules. This is in my opinion sufficient (among many other examples) to prove that the Basic set was incomplete. It was an insufficient ruleset set to describe everything that was included in its imaged game space - a fairly generic fantasy setting. This was less true, but still true, of the Basic set and the Expert set combined.
The issue is that it doesn't need to be big to be either D&D or a complete game, and we know this because it has been in the past.
And again, I think I've already demonstrated that it has never been a complete game at 200 pages or less, and that the closest it ever came was 304 pages (and even then, I'd already rejected it as incomplete).
I argue that given sufficient editorial care, 3.x, 4E, pathfinder or even HackMaster 4E could be produced "complete" in 200 pages or less.
Go ahead and do so then. I argue that a complete version of any of those games in 200 pages or less would have significant economic value.
Books are geeting smaller page counts with larger print, TV shows are losing minutes again (anyone actually TIME their favorite half-hour comedy lately versus about two years ago?) and I'm getting annoyed that people are charging higher price for less and less actual content. A freaking hour-long TV show in the late 70's was FIFTY minutes long!!! You're lucky if it's still 40 minutes...
