Java succeeded because it hit that critical time-window of being in the right time at the right place. But to achieve it, compromises were made. In particular, lots of language features were dropped - assertions, closures, enums, generics (sound familiar?). By all accounts, they weren't dropped to keep the language 'simple', so much as because the timeline dictated it.

Thus Java's so-called simplicity is a fallacy. Language changes now are simply completing the job that was unfinished back then and meeting the realities of Java as an enterprise language.