ALWAYS MINIMIZE?
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No... It all depends upon your market.

Minimizing a design is not good practice in all situations, I'd certainly agree to that. I've always viewed the business as a spectrum around three basic markets, high-tech, mass market, and civil contracts. The design criteria and goals are different in each area.

HIGH-TECH
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My definition of high-tech means you sell innovation and your customers are willing to pay. Getting the product to market first and with the highest features allows you to charge amounts that make engineers snicker at in the labs. The goal is to accomplish an impossible using available tools in creative ways. Minimization is only required for formfactor and reliabilty reasons. This is where I started my career.

MASS-MARKET
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Here the biggest design criteria is cost-cutting. Due to planned production volumes and profit curves, minimization is the ultimate rule. Working for one of these firms can be great experience, if for no other reason you learn to shove your component sales reps around. :-) I worked for such a company and we could dictate component prices and demand that the micro vendor supply us with emulators free-of-charge. heheehe

Civil Contracts
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The design objective here is to meet the contract conditions, under budget and ahead of time. While you're laughing at the non-reality on that, it does describe the goals if not the final account resolution. Here, minimizing a design is a waste of engineering time. "Don't make it, buy it" is the rule. Since every contract has a high degree of specialization, you could never lock down a common design. Having "elbow-room" in a design increases your safety margin for the surprises the customer forgets to mention until the last minute.

ALWAYS MINIMIZE CONCLUSIONS
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All jobs in my opinion have characteristics along those three axis. There is no "Always minimize rule".

-Jay C. Box