You cannot reduce it to simplicity, in best case you can make it manageable. Markets are too complicated to reduce them to simplicity. Coding is an essential part of trading. Everything you see on your screen is coding.
People with a high IQ don't say, by definition, they can do things that others can't. They are just trying to do something others can't. Trying is not the same as saying they can do things others can't. Evereywhere between smart and stupid people, there are some who think they can do anything. There are more stupid people than smart people who overestimate themselves. Precisely because of their (lack of) intelligence.
Attempting to understand or trade markets with numerouse indicators or having a chart full of straight or squiggly lines in order to arrive at a successful result has a worse result than approaching trading simply with basically no indicators or lines. Most noobs have no intention of understanding fundamentals nor coding, they believe 'everything is in the price' theoretically, but use numerous indicators to explain price.
It is very difficult (or even impossible) to have a discussion about what works and what does not. Each person has his own ideas and not every trader is satisfied with the same result. To be able to have a discussion that makes sense all people involved in the discussion should fully disclose their trading. And nobody is going to do that. What is a good return for trader A can be a detremenal return for trader B. Good returns for LT traders versus intraday traders are also completelly different. Knowing how quickly trolls appear on ET, and also because of privacy nobody wants to fully disclose their trading. Conclusion: as nobody can compare fully informed, two different systems (because they only know their own system) any discussion or conlusion is making any sense. I will compare it with 2 people which have a car: the American has a full option Mercedes. the Russian has a Moskvitch. there is a third one in Africa who never saw a car. For him any car would be the best. All are sure they have the best car. The American has the best car when people are informed about the two cars. The Russian (from Siberia) is convinced that he has the best car, as in the village where he lives, and which he never leaves, there are only two cars.
In general trading isn't that hard if you have realistic expectations. As far as automated trading goes a simple system can be coded up pretty easily. But it wont make money every month/quarter or even every year. And the drawdowns will last many months. And that includes low frequency intra day systems. If you want to code something that makes money almost every month or quarter, well that requires a lot more skill and effort and/or higher frequency. Even the Rentec Medallion fund cant make money every quarter. And they are some of the highest IQs on the planet, dedicated full time to trading and research.
In that old post I was probably talking about full time trading for a living. With no other source of income. It is not inconsistent with what i wrote two posts above, if you want to develop an approach that makes money almost every month and quarter (the kind of thing you everyone seeks to trade full time), I said it requires a lot more time and effort to develop. Yes, more than 10,000 hours. But something that only wins a bit more than 50% of months, but makes money most years, with say 20% returns, 1:1 MAR/Sharpe ratio is pretty easy to find. Those kind of systems are in the public domain already. But you cant really make a living from those, not unless you already have 500K for trading and can wait out the poor years.
It is my observation that casino patrons in the poker room seem more intelligent than the habitual players of negative EV casino games... even comparing just the losing poker players to people who regularly play negative EV casino games. As a group, almost certainly professional poker players and professional casino advantage players (card counters, promotion players, etc), are above the fifty percentile in IQ.