The cynic in me says this is deliberate. The only people who can afford to hire someone who knows 1/3 of the tax code (a very good CPA) is the only person who can possibly benefit from this level of abstraction.
I'm old enough to remember a time before turbotax and stuff. Of course, I wasn't old enough to do taxes, but I got the pleasure of watching my family suffer through them. You'd get your 50 page tax form in the mail and you would spend the next 3 months going back and forth adding obscure deductions, credits, penalties, etc to get your final number. If your final number didn't match the IRS's final number they'd fine you.
The system is absolutely insane. The idea of having to fill out a tax form to submit to a government body who knows everything you do tax-wise (post-9/11 and post-clinton war on drugs made it so the IRS gets access to basically any significant amount of money you have) is nuts. A small improvement to the system reverses the dependency graph - the IRS sends you an itemized form of what you paid and you, at your leisure, can check it for correctness. It is simply nuts that the IRS will penalize you for messing up on a form which they themselves have the entire body of knowledge needed to complete properly for you.
The current US tax system is set up to benefit the ultra rich through massive corporate lobbying to prevent easier solutions (TurboTax/Intuit being the primary offender). Everyone has stake in making sure it is as hard as possible to file your taxes correctly because hundreds of thousands of slimy tax accountant and IRS officer jobs are on the line should they fail. This is the principle problem with the rich. The power of lobbying is so great that the only people who can actually affect change are the rich. The people protesting on the streets are either abjectly poor, middle class, or lower-upper class. The actual people controlling the puppets in congress are the Bezos, Musks, Cooks, Waltons, Gates, etc. The current tax system is a painful reminder of that.
