I just read a very interesting article on Creating Passionate Users, about how adding tons of features in a product (software or other) can really harm the user experience.

Software that keeps adding feature upon feature until the simple things you used to do are no longer simple, and the whole thing feels overwhelming.

Another interesting article about (too many) Choices can be found on joelonsoftware.com.

My personal soft spot is number of fields. I hate products that have tens of fields, even for the simpler of causes. Many Project Management applications suffer from this, with Basecamp being a bright exception (only 2 fields for a to-do item).

For projects I have the final word, I always try to use the minimum number of fields possible (and near zero required ones). This is much harder than just going with all fields you can think of. You have to value each and every field separately, create many combinations and try to make sure you are not leaving anything important out. But it always pays off: forms come out much clearer and it doesn’t look scary to add a record.