Imagine a world where the first-time D&D player rolls stats, picks a race, picks a class, picks an alignment, and buys gear to create a character. Imagine if an experienced player, maybe the person helping our theoretical player learn the ropes, could also make a character by rolling ability scores and picking a race, class, feat, skills, class features, spells or powers, and so on. Those two players used different paths to build characters, but the system design allows them to play at the same table...Now let’s imagine that in a separate section of the rules—perhaps right after the core fighter or maybe in a chapter giving advanced character options—we learn that the core fighter is just a fighter with all of the choices made for it. Where the core fighter has class features, the advanced fighter has choice points such as feats and class feature menus. The core fighter simply has a set of pre-selected benefits.
If I open up my 3e Player's handbook, that sort of organization is exactly what I find. There are core starting packages that make all the fiddly choices of playing a class - including even equipment - right at the end of the class entry. Then there are sections describing the advanced options where you learn that you could have made different choices in tailoring the class exactly how you like it.
My guess is that for 95% of the market, these starting packages are just wasted space. Besides being not that innovative they just miss the point. Most cRPGs offer default starting packages and autoleveling as well, but very very few people who actually love cRPGs are going to leave those choices up to someone else). For D&D, the complexity of the system has never really been buried in the character creation, and no one jumps to HERO, Chill or even M&M because they found D&D too complex at character creation time.
D&D's real overhead has always come during combat, because D&D tracks alot of fiddly little modifiers in its quasi-simulationism, quasi-gamist combat model. Managing the little fiddly modifiers well is not only the time consuming part, but often the way to 'win'.
By breaking down the math behind the game, we can judge the relative value of a power you can use once per day and a feat that gives you a bonus to all of your attacks.
As others have pointed out, no you can't. 4e didn't even try. It gave everyone the same resource model. Other editions of D&D didn't care; balance wasn't a primary concern.
I think that baring a few notalgic players and groups with quality DMs overcome with nostalgia, there is very little desire for a game with a 48 page rule book. 3e proved nothing if not that players will continually clamor for more build options. 1e proved nothing if not that to cater to all the different ideas DMs have for 'what makes a good campaign', that you need all sorts of rules. Dragon was a fountain of optional rules back in the day and a real show case for keeping rules out of core but still helping DMs customize their campaign. No rules light system has ever made a really large impact on the market. For one thing, if you sale a complete game in 48 pages, what else do you have to sell?
If I have to point out something obvious, the really successful games of RPG history - D&D, CoC, V:tM, WEG Star Wars, Deadlands, etc. - didn't necesssarily have great rules. What they did however have was great writing, great feel, that made people want to play them. Gygax for all his organizational flaws made for really interesting reading.
The biggest problems with D&D since 3e haven't been the rules, and continually tinkering with the rules to achieve some perfect solution for everyone isn't going to help much with the problems of not stimulating creativity in DMs or failing to publish quality modules. A complex game with fewer options isn't a simple game - it's just one with less choice. In practice, most DM's are going to build there system out of the available options anyway. Granted, 3e partially drowned under the notion that everything that was published ought to be in play, but that's because 3e made this decision that the players were where the money was at and spent most of their time ensuring each new book had something to market to players (compare with 2e, for example). But even so, that wasn't a failure of the system save to the extent that WotC never wanted to say, "hey, you don't have to buy our books'. Mainly that was a failure of the DMs that were so buried but didn't want to be. DM's that want fewer options should just grow a backbone and say, "No." It is ok some times.
