WHYYY is LDAP so god damn convoluted??!?
I love the idea of it, but in practice, everything is just a hack on top of hack on top of hack going as far back as the 90s.

Hierarchical databses compared to Relational Databases are less fun, yes. But it does a pretty damn good job for relavent use cases. Also not that hard to follow once you get the hang of it. But if you are referring to just LDAP protocol, then maybe.

To quote a colleague of mine (when I was complaining that "looking at these filter strings without knowledge of ldap is like looking at hieroglyphics"):

"Dude, I totally agree. LDAP is great for what it does, but nobody ever, ever uses this crap outside of it. There was this whole push in the 80s to standardize a mountain of admittedly-useful, admittedly great stuff associated with it, but it never took off because it's way too complicated. People shat on it because it's over-engineered. And the irony, of course, is that _because_ it's over-engineered, it's withstood the test of time and is still around, unchanged, today."