Simple or Complex?

Yesterday evening I went to a local Buddhist meeting. It is a new group which is being set up and it is sometimes to be taken by a particular Buddhist practitioner who has many years of practice and has written on or two books on the subject.

I enjoyed the meditation and the talk afterwards and also being with friends who were there.
The leader is of the view that what is important with Buddhism is the practice of simply being aware. He seemed to be saying that Buddhism and Buddhists can get bogged down with too many complexities. Most of the practice within this group would be centred around being mindful and aware within meditation and within our daily lives.

Simply being mindful can often be enough to feel better and even sometimes change and transform things that may be bothering us in our lives. However I did have a question which I put to him during the talk after meditation and it related to my own experience.

A few years ago I was suffering some pains which most likely were psychosomatic. Simply being aware of them was not enough to deal with them. However meditation did seem to put me in contact with the cause of them which was psycho/emotional. I started to apply what could be called meditation on emptiness to the problem. Without going into too much detail about what this is it can involve analysing phenomena seeing it's origins and breaking it down into its parts whether this is a person or a thing. This involved doing something which was a bit more complex than just being aware. However it worked far better than just being aware.
I put this experience to him I hoped in the context of questioning is it always true under all circumstances that the simple is the best. I would like it myself if the simple was always the way. He gave the following answers.

He said he knew that there were different practices etc. He was not being critical of what I was saying. He said however that the community or Sangha is important in that having support for things that happen with development. He said that practice is emotional. By this I understand it to be that we encounter our emotions. It was one of those moments where upon first hearing a reply I feel I have to go and think about it in order to understand the point.

Later I thought sure these things are positive or have the potential to be but I couldn't help wondering if this was just a side issue. I was pointing out that maybe something is not true all the time. Would it have been better if he could have just acknowledged that or put a counter argument to show that I was wrong or something else but I cannot understand why he referred to those things in particular.