Thinking "I want my cake and eat it too" can be good practice, and so what on the surface of things are mutually exclusive design features or properties can occasionally be overcome or partially alleviated with smart engineering or a sound, pragmatic approach to acoustic design. Simplicity and maintaining a single point source per channel has its merits and is a core element to strive for, and yet a widebander will be frequency extreme challenged for obvious reasons, among other things. However Tom Danley came up with the synergy horn that sums the output of several, closely mounted drivers from tweeter to woofer within a single horn flare, thereby acting as a single point source over a fairly wide frequency range while, practically speaking, not being SPL limited. There's a degree of complexity, yes, but it all serves a purpose to what sums into a single point source - which in itself is a very desirable trait.
More typically spaced drivers in a multi-way design (i.e.: that therefore don't emulate a point single source) can be made to behave less acoustically divided when also paying attention to dispersive behavior and matching directivity patterns over crossover points between driver sections and maintaining good power response. My own speaker setup is a 4-way design, but there's only a single crossover point between ~80 to 11.5kHz and so, essentially, it's an augmented 2-way design (that's capable of +125dB SPL). Being also the speakers maintain uniformity of dispersion pattern at the vital crossover frequency at just over 600Hz, it helps to aid the impression of listening to what's a "widebander on steroids."
The aspect of simplicity, or at least that of maintaining a single point (or line) source per channel should, ultimately, be approximated with every speaker design, I find. Oftentimes I think of a smaller, simple quality 2-way speaker setup with an integrated amp and a turntable to be the core qualities I seek to achieve and f*ck up as little as possible in my current setup, but "beefed up" to have the combination of a coherent, full-range, resolved, tonally accurate, analogue sounding and dynamically uninhibited presentation with, in my case, a digital source only.
So, to me it's about merging one and the other, simplicity/purity of approach with complexity, and achieving (or trying to maintain) in a sense the former via the means of the latter, and built upon it. Sort of like having your cake and eat it too..
