What about #1b: you have an overly-complex "system", but most of that "system" is serverless (i.e. managed architecture that's Somebody Else's Problem), with your own business-logic only being exposed to a rather simple API?

I'm thinking here of engineering teams who, due to worries about scaling their query IOPS, turn not to running a Hadoop cluster, but rather to using something like Google's BigTable.