Why the Shadowrun system is easy but the game is complicated
Shadowrun is an easy game
Or at least the rules are
I am not claiming it's a rules light game but its no more complicated than DnD 5e for example.
But it is perceived to be an overly complicated game and it is often played that way.
While my experience is mostly with SR5 my criticism applies to all SR editions.
I am of the opinion that the core of the problem lies in its character creation method.
It's hell a fun building a character in Shadowrun, the way that all characters need to lack in certain areas and the way one seeks to remedie these lacks.
But that is precisly the problem, a character creation process that allows for skill expression inherently incentivises building characters with power in mind. The incenctive to get as strong a character out of character creation is compounded by the fact, that while advancement costs rise linear in character creation they rise superlinear in play.
This primes players to look at evrything in the book to gain an edge in character creation. And with this mode of interacting with the system its no wonder shadowrun is often played with players trying to apply all the rules in the book.
But Shadowrun is far from the only game with a bunge of rules for strange edge cases, the difference is that in other games players simply ignore the ones they dislike(spawning anoying youtube videos like "5 DnD Rules you didnt knew exist"). Meanwhile I have encountered Shadowrun players making statesments like "X is not possible because there is no rule specificly resolving it in any of the supplements".
There a obviously more factors leading to shadowrun beeing perceived and played as a complicated game(the newer books are terribly put together, a game know for beeing complicated attracting people that want to go through all the rules in the book, the way it splits Meat/Matrix/Astral space,...) but anyone wanting to run Shadowrun as the easy game it can be needs to get rid of the character creation sytem. I myself know how enjoyable it can be to create Shadowrun characters but its terrible bad for the game.
Kill your darlings!!!