Miscellaneous Thoughts for Programmers talks about avoiding the hard stuff. It quotes the classic Ruby versus Java myths page:

In what serious discipline is “It’s too hard” a legitimate excuse? I have never seen a bank that eschews multiplication: “We use repeated addition here–multiplication was too hard for our junior staffers.” And I would be uncomfortable if my surgeon said, “I refuse to perform procedures developed in the last 10 years–it is just too hard for me to learn new techniques.”