Is accounting too complicated?

There was an interesting speech given by Robert Herz, the FASB's chairman at the AICPA's spring council meeting. In the speech, Herz suggested that the current literature is too complicated and that it is time to get to work on the FASB's long-term codification project:

"There's a lot of cross-currents in the profession and water coming out of a lot of places in terms of accounting standards," Herz said during the opening session of the three-day confab. "The question is what do we do with this morass of accounting literature?"

Herz outlined the profession's need to codify GAAP, and outlined FASB's multi-year codification project, where existing standards would be restructured by topic and accompanied by all relevant literature.

Herz also stated:

"Auditors have become tired and strained and there's a real fear of second-guessing," Herz said. "It's come to the point where they're saying, 'Just give me a rule.'"

What does this suggest for accounting education? How should we go about teaching accounting when it appears that we want principles but end up wioth standards?