paradox: people value complex design, rather than simple designs

I'm currently writing up my MBA dissertation and I'm searching for a NAME that describes the paradox that:

• achieving a simple, elegant design is very hard work but
• since the design is so simple and elegant it looks like it should be easy.
• so you get less credit than if you design something that looks complicated.

Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, discusses this concept in Chapter 17 of Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles and even has a section titled "If It's Easy to Understand, Then It Can't Be Very Profound", but he hasn't named the concept, which is what I'm looking for.

Some of the consequences of this paradox:

• If you design something that's simple and elegant then your boss will ask you why it took so long or someone will say it's just plain common sense and they knew it all along (see the comment to this earlier post, for example).
• If you work long hours, or appear stressed, then people will think you're a better worker. (e.g. my boss recently told me that (a) he was thrilled with the quality and output of my work package and that it was largely down to my work, but (b) he was extremely disappointed that I'd only worked 6 hours overtime in the last year, unlike the troopers on the other (struggling) work packages who were coming in at the weekends).
• If you write a long document that's complicated and full of hard words then people will often rate the work as better than an simpler, easier version.

I posted this question on the information design guru Edward Tufte's FANTASTIC website and got a few interesting answers, but none were quite right - although "hindsight bias" is getting close.

My friends on the APICS Constraint Management SIG email list had a few more examples: 

• Jeff "SKI" Kinsey gave a classic example: 'i think mark twain and malcolm forbes said, "that if i had more time, i would have written a shorter letter." meaning that it takes time to refine and make it more concise and readable.' (NOTE: ski, doesn't use capitals)
• Tony Rizzo gave another  'It seems that you're looking for the antithesis of the Rube Goldberg.  I had a friend in Bell Labs, who faced a similar situation at every salary review process. My friend was an expert in surface-mount solder reliability, and he did his job. But at every salary review process somebody would always point out that the organization didn't really need my friend, because they never had any solder problems with their products.' [BTW: Rube Goldberg drew a series of cartoons that showed extremely clever and complicated "inventions" for doing simple, everyday tasks].
• and Grant Lindsay pointed out that "Nobody misses the water until the well runs dry..."

 

Can anyone help?