>Surely you're not suggesting that over-complexity be built into an application to satisfy unanticipated needs? If the aforementioned app was built single tier or 2-tier, it would still be pretty easy to build Web access to the data via InterDev. Was this a physical 3+-tier model?

No, what I am suggesting is that n-tier is not necessarily a more complex solution. Once the classes exist it really takes no more or less effort to make an app n-tier than 1 tier.

I think that n-tier often gets a bad rap as being complex when it is not.