What about apt do you find too complex? I guess what’s re you defining as 'complex"?
The fact that it has recommended and suggested dependencies, meta-packages and virtual packages, that installing a package ad then removing it again often leaves your system in a different state than before, that it has 7 different default front-ends for different tasks, …
Debian is the most vanilla distro you can get
Debian packages often deviate significantly from upstream.