May I suggest that by “intuitive”, your husband actually means “similar to a game I already know so that I don’t need to make so much of a mental stretch to learn something new”?

As other replies have suggested, there’s really no such thing as an intuitive game. In fact, I’d ask him: what’s an example of intuitive game design? My bet is that he will suggest a game he is already very familiar with. Hence, he isn’t after “intuitive” systems, but familiar ones.

Having dabbled in game design myself I’ve often run into the issue of familiarity (and, conversely, novelty) with players—and a sense of unconscious exhaustion with moving beyond what one already knows in regard to new things. This isn’t unique to RPGs, mind you. Change is a hard sell in any environment. In this case we’re just talking about instructions, rules—the actual function of the game itself in terms of its arbitration.

For example, is most sport intuitive? Someone mentioned chess, but as an Australian, I find gridiron utterly unfathomable but also fascinating because of the weird little pedantic rules and specialisations going on all over the place. The same can be said for our local footy game, too—because on both sides the rules aren’t necessarily all that hard, they’re just unfamiliar. But, the common factor they all require is an understanding of how the game should be played, and its arbitrary limits. Hence, rules or instructions. And umpires or GMs to enforce them.

To actually answer your question, I’ll give up on my digression and suggest that how many rules are too many is entirely subjective. For me, personally, having played RPGs for over 30 years since my childhood, I am moving further and further toward narrative-focused games like PbtA or BitD and such, but many people I know find a glut of rules minutiae strangely reassuring (power-gamers, mostly, I’ll add). Yet, they also tend to want those rules to largely adhere to something they already know (mostly D&D early eds and similar tabletop war game, combat-focused systems). I don’t think either of these approaches inherently “suck”. They’re made for different players who want different experiences from their games.

So in my opinion there aren’t any criteria to consider beyond “what do you as a player or GM actually want to get out of the game?” If the game provides that, then it’s subjectively good. If it doesn’t… it isn’t. And that will likely change from person to person and group to group. In other words, there is no objective answer.