Many of our design decisions are based on our gut feeling about how to avoid complexity and bloating. Some of our complexity-fears are true, we have plenty of painful experience on throwing away deprecated code. Other times we learn that some particular task isn't really that complex as we though it to be. We notice for example that upkeeping 3000 lines of code in one file isn't that difficult... or that using special purpose "dirty flags" isn't really bad OO practice... or that in some cases it's more convenient to have 50 variables in one class that have 5 different classes with shared responsibilities... One friend has even stated that adding functions to the program isn't really adding complexity to your system.

So, what do you think, where does bloated complexity creep from? Is it variable count, function count, code line count, code line count per function, or something else?