But does this approach actually simplify the problem, or just rename it?

The best answer to this particular question is the book, Behavior: The Control of Perception. In a way, it's like a miniature Origin of Species, showing how you can build up from trivial neural control systems to complex behavior... and how these levels more or less match various stages of development in a child's first year of life. It's a compelling physical description and hypothesis, not merely an abstract idea like "hey, let's model humans as control systems."

The part that I found most interesting is that it provides a plausible explanation for certain functions being widely distributed in the brain, and thereby clarified (for me anyway) some things that were a bit fuzzy or hand-wavy in my own models of how memory, monoidealism, and inner conflict actually work. (My model, being software-oriented, tended to portray the brain as a mostly-unified machine executing a program, whereas PCT shows why this is just an illusion.)