The Digital Turn in Religious Studies has intensified a persistent tension: scholars can remain mere "consumers" of digital tools, or become co-designers of the infrastructures that shape research practices in a field marked by heterogeneity of sources, languages, supports, and semantics. This paper presents HORTUS, an integrated digital environment developed within the ITSERR project as a service platform for the RESILIENCE ecosystem designed by the Digital Humanists themselves. HORTUS combines: (1) a moderated catalogue/marketplace for datasets, publications, software and services; (2) a collaborative workspace for storing, versioning and sharing research outputs; (3) an integrated training centre (e-learning); (4) an experts directory with social interaction features; an 5) hosting IT services capability delivered through dashboards, VRE and scalable computing. The platform is designed for interoperability and secure collaboration: federated authentication and OpenID Connect, role-based authorization, and GDPR-aligned operations underpin access to resources and services, while FAIR-oriented metadata workflows support findability and reuse and enable integration with external repositories (e.g., Zenodo; Zotero). We discuss how the "complexity" of Religious Studies has directly informed platform design choices—such as moderated contribution workflows and forthcoming capabilities for collaborative annotation, custom metadata sets, and advanced visualisation. We argue that these solutions are not only disciplinary enablers but also transferrable patterns for other Digital Humanities and data-intensive communities, offering a concrete answer to the panel's guiding question about complexity as a driver for broader technological innovation.