I'd argue putting CloudFront on top of S3 is less complex than getting the permissions and static sharing setup right on S3 itself.
If you know what you're doing, as it sounds like you and I do, then all of this is very easy to get set up (but then aren't most things easy when you already know how? hehe). However we are talking about people who aren't comfortable with vanilla S3, so throwing another service into the mix isn't going to make things easier for them.