Is it only me? But I see shortcuts, the possibility of simplifying things, just a little bit more, all the time in TiddlyWiki. It may have become an obsession, but it has also inspired an idea for a book, about a reiterative application of Occam’s Razor to ideas, code and tiddlywiki.
I’m sorry, you’ve lost me there…could you explain what you mean? 
How does one avoid always making and developing new ways to do things, tiddlywiki is so customisable and one good solution often can be generalised into another even better solution.
I don’t think it’s only you. I’m a software architect, and the best developers/architects I work with all share the same view: relentless simplification.
This is often accompanied by a focus on abstraction: the more you abstract away from a specific problem, the more generalized your solution may be, and generally the more simple.
It’s harder to do that with TiddlyWiki than with many other tools. Its long history is dragged around with it everywhere. I love the fact that the very first TWs still work well, but because of that, it’s harder to make changes. Have there been any intentional breaking changes since 5.0? If so, I imagine they’re quite rare. But that’s about the core TW itself. In terms of using it, we can find shortcuts/simplifications everywhere. I’m guessing that 5.3 will offer many such opportunities.
I think that’s a necessary part of learning. Once you have the generalized solution, and once you have internalized it, you can let go of the more specific ones. The next time you need it, you will be able to reach for the generalized one. But you usually need to start with the specific one, often several specific ones, until you see the commonalities that let you generalize. This isn’t specific to TW; it’s common to learning any complex system.
I concur with your observations however point out that these comments relate to the domain of TiddlyWiki and what supprises me is how deep and far we can go within tiddlywiki itself. By its nature tiddlywiki is a database, records and fields, UI etc… So I suppose its use of JS html and CSS expands its posibilities into those domains as well.
I see the tinkering as something to be embraced, as long as it doesn’t prevent you from doing the work you want to be doing.
I think if you find yourself tinkering a lot, it means naturally inclined to want to find more efficient ways of doing something. It often removes mental blockages but sometimes at the expense of increasing complexity.
Depending on the context (mostly at work), I have sometimes created massively elaborate solutions (very complicated Excel spreadsheets) that took way more time to create and most people could not easily recreate. Is it a good idea to make people reliant on work they themselves could not replicate? Probably not. I have also seen other people create rather complicated solutions (for example using AirTable to manage meeting minutes) and the resulting overhead of one more technology platform to learn does increase complexity for not much extra benefit. Using the software should not get in the way of doing the actual work and if it distracts us from doing the actual work or addressing the important questions then it is holding us back.
Thanks for your perspective. I suppose I am both celebrating and warning the reader that on one hand tiddlywiki seems to be infinatly reducible to shortcuts and simplifications and on the other hand expands into complexity systems.
TiddlyWiki can be a delightful place to play with capturing the complex as well as simplifying the complex and can help learn the values of reiterative design methods. But you need to be pragmatic to avoid being consumed by its posibilities, this is human frailty not tiddlywiki.