I'm going to guess that it looks over-engineered to you because you haven't been a chemist. This is the chemist equivalent of solving a problem with a 10 line Ruby script: perhaps more complicated than the very simplest conceivable solution, definitely a terrible path to solution if you were suggesting it to a lay third party, but not very complicated at all for someone who has spent a lot of time in the lab. It looks a lot more complicated to someone working outside the domain than someone working inside of it.