I am an amateur woodworker. Not a professional. Not an artist... but I love to create things with my own hands, included wood working.
On the other hand I am also an Engineer (OK, nobody is perfect... ), so I try to separate reality from passion... I can understand most of us here in the forum have a passion for wood working but I think we have to know where is the border between both of them.
One case I would like to bring is wood joints. I read a lot about elaborated wood joints and their advocates elaborating about how important they are for a strong construction, but from my own experience most of them looks me overkill.
I would like to share with you a couple of examples where simple and fast joints demonstrated to be very solid and durable.
The first one is the drawers I made to our home and they are distributed by the kitchen, library, laundry, dorms and bathroom: they have a raised panel front but the box is made from 12 mm (1/2") plywood butt jointed, yellow glued and reinforced with a few brad nails. I guess we have around 30 of them spreaded in the home. Not a single one presented any stability problem. Rock solid up to today after 25 years of intense use. They resisted a couple of toddlers up to their adulthood, also... BTW I had to change two or three sets of Blum rail guides in that time as they failed...
Another example is the bookshelves we have in the library, also made 25 years ago. I had on the occasion a number of books to bring to our (then) new home and just a very limited amount of time to construct something to house them, so I went to a "temporary" solution of very simple book shelves using 20 mm mahogany covered plywood. I decided to use only screws. Each shelf is 732 mm long and supports something between 25 to 30 kg of books. Only two 45 X 4.5 mm wood screws support them from each side. No glue. No grooves. No sagging or other problem at all after 25 years... so they turned my "definitive" solution. I have 48 of such shelves fully loaded. (bellow I included a few pictures of them)
Bottom line: Although I love elaborated wood joints and the artistry to make them, for most applications I have found I do not need them for the sake of sturdiness. Elaborated joints for decorative purposes are another history...
I would like to listen your experience using simple joints against the more elaborated ones.
All the best!