"Do the simplest thing that could possibly work" is a good strategy. When future you will have completely forgotten how you did something, maybe they will also try the simplest thing first and land on the same approach that past you tried.
The phrase gets a good workout at http://c2.com/xp/DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork.html credited to Kent Beck in the context of conversation with Ward Cunningham at https://www.artima.com/articles/the-simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work.
My own perspective on this is relatively to systems issues more so than programming. Often there will be something I want to try out, not necessarily to use it forever and for all time but just to get a hint of what it can do. Installing modern software can be very complicated, but if you are lucky enough people have diligently sanded off the rough edges so that you can install things the easy way and get something working tilted up relatively fast.
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