Nope, none of what you describe equates to 'complexity', there just happens to be more 'stuff' (unless you consider other, more popular languages with even more tools/libraries to be even more complex, in which case we have different viewpoints on what that word means in this context).

Sure, not everything is in opam and that can be quite frustrating but the improvements over the last few years have done a lot to reduce the pain that people experience (not increase it). Seriously, would you rather have the old ecosystem back? I know a large number of devs who would be quite hostile to that idea.

The standard library question isn't new and has been going on for some time but the options now are substantially better then they ever have been. Ask around and get feedback from others on what might suit your needs best. Until the community naturally converges on something, this is just how it is.

> "And unfortunately, it didn't work on my particular mac with homebrew."

So what went wrong? The instructions for homebrew are two lines and my experience here was flawless. The slew of instructions you point at are largely for Linux distros and most of those are also only a few lines. Were you trying any of these? It's clear that the install page you point to needs work (who still uses fink?) but in most cases it's just a time-consuming process, rather than a difficult one (i.e you just sit there while things compile). If something goes wrong, then reporting it on the list [1] or issue tracker [2] will help others to fix it.

[1] https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list

[2] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.org/issues