The Fall of Rome - was it complexity?

[SigniferOne]

I believe it would be truer to say that the Roman Empire "evolved" to a point where it was no longer recognisable as the Empire of old.......in other words, that it never "fell" but rather evolved......

I have a lot of difficulty understanding this sort of response. And pardon me if my reply is a little tetchy, because I've seen this statement repeated a number of times over a course of years.

Was not Rome sacked, something unthinkable in her lighter years? Was not it sacked by people who cared nothing for its statues or literary niceties? I just don't understand how one could deny the empirical fact of Roman collapse. It would be another thing to say that up to the fall, Roman empire evolved, in such a way that led to its collapse, but the collapse itself was not evolution or a gradual process in any way. It was abrupt, brutal, and final.