I agree that area scoring rules are much simpler, since the territory scoring in Japanese rules seems to require a complicated and counter-intuitive procedure to resolve life and death.
However, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say that Japanese rules are trying to replicate the same results as Chinese rules. There are some rare cases where Japanese rules produce very different life and death determinations. I think some of those cases might actually be by design, in order to keep in line with historical and traditional precedence.
For example, Japanese and Chinese rules behave very differently in a case that I discuss in this thread: