Comment by AnimalMuppet

No, he's advocating simplicity. The problem is that "really does what's needed" beats "simple" every time. And the other problem is that the person designing the module often has an incomplete idea of what's actually needed, which makes it really easy to design something that is simple but incomplete, and therefore more beautiful than useful. I think that much of the war between "worse is better" and "the right thing" is exactly this - worse is better if it actually does what's needed, and "the right thing" that doesn't actually meet the user's needs isn't actually the right thing.

So, absolutely, work for simple interfaces. Absolutely, try to do the right thing rather than just creating a ball of mud. But the real world is a messy place, and your code needs to handle some of that mess in order to actually be useful rather than merely an entry in the museum of beautiful design.