Somewhere along the way I realized that design skill has as much to do with making convincing business cases for simplifying your business offering as it does with what design patterns we use. Approached this way, these types of articles help in the same way software design patterns do: perhaps refactoring the code will improve the smell, but its also possible we have an unnecessarily complex business problem ("50 more news categories than anyone will ever actually browse through", for example), and we need to make a case for simplifying the architecture.