My impression was that Catalyst is more complex. The documentation to Catalyst says, Catalyst is based upon Maypole, which you should consider for smaller projects. That reinforces my impression. And, I'm sorry, but your article did not dispell it. Yes, you got a lot done in 30 lines of code. But to do that work you need to know how a lot of moving pieces fit together, and there is (to me) some quite surprising use of directives embedded in comments that would take some getting used to.

Besides, this Maypole intro took less code, with fewer visible moving parts (and less magic) to get an application that looks more useable.

None of that means, of course, that Catalyst is particularly complex. Indeed, if it does its job, then working with it should be far from complex. But there is a definite learning curve associated with it.