At times, it can seem like watchmakers are on a quest to cram as much microscopic machinery into a 40mm case as possible. Calendars, chronographs, repeaters and tourbillons – the capacity of high-end horology to dazzle with detail never ends. But is it best? Is there actually something to be said for the simpler designs? Where hour, minutes and seconds are left alone to do what they do best. Two watch experts go head-to-head to make their arguments.

Too often, we fall easily into the fallacy that more – even more of a good thing – equals better. But any car nut will agree that you can have more fun in a manual, petrol-powered Lotus Elise than a two-tonne hybrid hypercar. The Lotus founder Mr Colin Chapman lived by the motto “simplify and add lightness”. Like all good engineers, he knew that less is more.

Many a watch brand will boast of the number of individual parts contained within its latest grand complication, sometimes thousands of them. But anyone with a degree of mechanical, or mathematical, sympathy knows that the most beautiful form is the one with the fewest components, the one that achieves its goal with the minimum amount of effort.

More complications on your watch inevitably means more things that can go wrong. Not that I am calling into question the build quality of Switzerland’s finest, but by and large it is the three-hand automatics that you would comfortably take to the beach, rather than the minute repeaters and split-second chronographs.

Ms Coco Chanel knew the value of simplicity, too, with her oft-quoted advice to simplify your get-up before you go out. Great chefs may have mastered arcane culinary arts to deliver oyster gel, samphire ice cream and essence of fennel, but few would argue with the sheer pleasure of a perfect fish and chips. Not by accident did the almost featureless form of an iPhone obliterate the fussy, fiddly Blackberries and Nokias of the 2000s. You get the idea. So it is with watches. Simplicity reveals good design. A Cartier Tank, even after more than a century, still knows no equal as a dress watch. There is a reason the earliest pilots’ watches and dive watches have become iconic over time: they are a true example of form following function. Having encapsulated the platonic ideal of their horological niche, all that was left for everyone else to do was imitate and complicate.

Lest you think I am casting aside the last 70 years of watchmaking in one sentence, I will caveat my argument slightly: there is such a thing as elegant complexity. Witness the aesthetic created by Ressence, or the approach taken by the likes of Ochs und Junior and H. Moser & Cie. to perpetual calendars and tourbillons. Do you need to know today’s date, and that alone, or do you need to be shown every possible date in the year with a tiny arrow pointing to the information you want? The problem is not so much with mechanically sophisticated watches, but a design language that flaunts complexity for its own sake. Time to get back to basics.

If you were once that kid who took things apart to see how they worked (I make no claims about successfully putting anything back together), then you will almost certainly derive a great deal of pleasure from the ingenuity behind even the most basic watch movement and the mechanical methods used to store and release energy in a uniform, constant manner. It’s genius, plain and simple and the only thing better is, well, more.

I’d love to say functionality comes into it, but when was the last time anyone needed to hear the time represented as a series of chimes or that a chronograph was used to time anything important? (The answer is 53 years ago during the Apollo 13 mission.) I’ve come to realise that my own cycling through the start/stop/reset of a chronograph has more in common with worry beads or fidget toys than it does recording elapsed time. Today, the most practical complication is probably the humble date display and even that somehow manages to drift off course five times a year.

While your Apple Watch can trounce a mechanical watch in terms of practical functionality, the physical mechanics of watchmaking are amazing both in concept and as a visual spectacle in a way that Cupertino’s finest solid-state electronics never will be. The addition of more advanced complications only serves to make for a more impressive watch.

Take the gateway complication, the chronograph, for instance. It features an entirely separate mechanism that piggybacks off of the timekeeping mechanism, using clutches, levers and wheels to mesh together when engaged by a column wheel. The whole process demands to be seen through a sapphire display case back. Step up to a perpetual calendar, which, while not as interactive, introduces another level of complexity through star wheels, leap-year cams and something majestically titled the “central grand lever” that coordinates the whole system.

Start bringing these complications together to form a grand complication and movements become labyrinthine three-dimensional marvels, miniature horological citadels formed of hundreds and hundreds of tiny components, which, at this level, will be decorated to the highest standards – a dizzying mélange of black-polished and blued screws, hand-polished bevelled edges, Geneva stripes and perlage. From here, simple watchmaking looks, visually at least, too easy. At the highest, most complicated levels of watchmaking, each of the hundreds of hours lavished on a watch during its creation is all too evident.