Hourglass design model

When explaining an idea to one of my friend, I accidentally called the concept hourglass design, and I am going to explain what I mean by that right now. Look at the attached picture.

When designing games, most of the time people do what could be called abstraction design.

At the beginning there is a concept taken in real life. In order for this concept to be placed in a game it needs to be simplified.

For example:

Concept: Army composed of people, personel, equipment, tents, etc.

Once you made abstration of these concepts, you end up with:

Players can have 4 type of units: Infantry, artillery cavalry and ships which are each represented by a different miniature.

So it could be summarized as:start large, end simple.

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In and hour class design, things are different, it could be summarized as

Start large, shrink it to extremely simple and than expand it again to average complex.

For example:

Concept: Same as above

Extreme Simplification: An army is represented on the board with a pawn.

Expansion: When the army enter a battle, you use unit cards that are going to detail the composition of your army. These cards are ignored if the army is not in a battle.

In the design above, when you extremely simplify, everything disappears: the cavalry, the artillery, etc. Then when a combat occur, everything complexify itself. But still, the level of complexity is lower that the original concept to make it used in a game.

By using a design like this, it allows to add more complexity more easily to a board game where normally it would have been impossible to manage. The idea is that the complexity only show up in a certain situation rather than all the time.

What do you think?