Most/Least Complicated Countries To Collect

In your experience, what do you consider to be the most and least complicated countries to collect? For instance, Argentina stamps have individual issues that come in a variety of watermarks, perforations, etc., while Australia is a lot more straightforward in this regard.

Perhaps something like Pitcairn Island?

You might want to read this thread
https://goscf.com/t/18694

Hard to think of the best and worst, but here's some ideas:

Ridiculously complicated - Brazil.
Ridiculously simple - Sweden, Vatican City, Bermuda.

The United Nations is fairly simple to collect and probably one of the lesser expensive.

I write a little more about it in these threads:

https://goscf.com/t/10581

https://goscf.com/t/4554

https://goscf.com/t/21861

https://goscf.com/t/15431

Australian Antarctic Territory stamps are very straight-forward, and there aren't many issues.

Try Korea - especially the Japanese Occupation Period; USMG Occupation and North Korea Occupation of South Korea. Or any easy one, pre-1900 Japan. You'd better have a great scanner, a knowledge of the forgeries, and even better knowledge of papers.

Hal

P.S. EVERY county that issued an engraved stamp, with or without a watermark or perfs, is up for the award of the "most complicated" -- ask any specialist in that country.

Palestine, with all the segments and poor ID as to Egypt, UAR, etc.

The Indian States offer some of your best and worst.

Collect three stamps from Rajpipla



and you've done the whole country.

On the other hand, get into the 50+ settings of the Bundi Sacred Cows



also with three different types of Official overprint, in black red or green ...

And if you're really adventurous, try the watercolour and oil printings on native and European papers of Jammu & Kashmir



Something for everyone!

In general:
The larger the country the more complicated it will be.
The more political and social turmoil the country has had historically the more complicated it will be.
The more historically popular a country has been in philatelic terms the more complicated it will be.
Revenues of any almost country will always be complicated because governments wanted as many different revenue streams as possible, and tax laws are never simple.

Succinct and well-stated, revcollector

Its up to the collector how in depth and complicated they want their collection to be .With the exception of some of the countries after WWII were your basicly only have face different stamps.Its the early stamps were there is no limit to how complicated a collector wants to be .

Watermarks are the pain. As an old man, no longer excited by the smell of benzine, I luxuriate in Yugoslavia's total absence of watermarks. Whereas as a callow youth with Travancore I ran myself stupid trying to get all the watermarks on all the values - upside down, sideways and back to front; all I wound up with was a small article in India Post and pages of stamps which to everyone who looked at them pityingly seemed exactly the same!

I long ago despaired of the watermarks of Travancore, too. But there are new recruits to the game who are carrying on the struggle.

I agree with Tony.
There are so many states and the lettering on most of the stamps is not the latin alphabet.
I am only speaking from the experience I have of Commonwealth countries though. I wouldn't want to tackle China or Japan

I find Brazil and Argentina difficult because of the many watermarks that exist for the older issues. Recent issues are hard to get (availability) but not difficult once you have them. No multitude of different varieties as far as I know.
Japan is hard because of the huge number of modern stamps which are difficult to catalogue, especially the Furusato / prefecture stamps that lack a date stamp.
I am surprised no-one has yet mentioned Great Britain. The older definitive issues have all the different watermarks, with various orientations and then there are the phosphoresent ones in the 1960s and ofcourse the avalanche of different Machins.