You've missed the point: it isn't mathematicians who've made it overly complicated. It is people responsible for /teaching/ math. Mathematicians have made it exactly as complicated as it needs to be, no more and no less. But many textbook authors have taken that complicatedness and introduced it into areas where it isn't needed, out of a lack of understanding as to why it was needed in the first place. An example from TFA: mathematicians prefer "|x-5|2" over "x is between 3 and 7" because the former generalizes naturally to arbitrary metric spaces (like R^n). But until somebody is ready to talk about distance in R^2, and circles and such, the latter should be preferred. It uses less notation, and requires less thought to really grok.

The crab nebula is 6500 light years away. The SN1006 event was 7200 light years away. The Betelgeuse supernova could appear to earthlings at any moment, and it's only 640 light years away.