Unfortunately, as I am sure you will confirm from your own professional background, Martin, 'simpler' doesn't necessarily equate to 'truer'.

No of course it doesn't, but which overcomplications do you pick?  For example, you might ask yourself the question, 'Why do we have tides?',  the simple, boring explanation is that it's down, mainly, to the gravitational pull of the Moon on the Earth.   There are any number of complicated ones which fit the facts, but for which there is no reproducible evidence.  I'll give you three.

1. Tides are down to gnomes who live, secretively on the other side of the moon who use a gadget called a turkulator to attract the water in the oceans causing it to swell slightly.

2. The tides and the moon are forming a complicated dance because both really are sentient beings  with whom certain privileged people can hold a conversation.

3. Tides are completely ficticious, they are actually a mass hallucination caused by the proximity of green Martian snowstorms, which fall occasionally on Mars but are undetectable by humans.

My point is that the sheer number of other complicated explanations, which are completely unsupported by anything other than hearsay, are utterly limitless.  One holds no more weight than another because none derive from any factual evidence.  If more people believe number 1 than believe number 3 it's, pretty much, immaterial since, when the proposals are analysed, there are no facts whatsoever to support any of them.

We do have the reproducible fact of gravitational pull which would fully explain the tides showing that tides are exactly what you'd expect to happen when a moon the size. mass and distance of ours orbits a planet like ours. We can't prove that tides are down to gravity, but it's not like gravity ranks alongside lunar gnomes in likelihood as an explanation.