Such essays are always about concepts that cannot be precisely defined. That aside, I believe that it wasn't really simplicity that "worse" was associated with but easyness.
This distinction is well described by Rich Hickey (of Clojure fame) in his "simple made easy" talk. The key point is that simple-complex and easy-hard are two separate axes and that "easy" usually leads to "complex" (the case of x86, I believe) but you can invest some effort in shaping the environment so that "simple" can be "easy".
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Such essays are always about concepts that cannot be precisely defined. That aside, I believe that it wasn't really simplicity that "worse" was associated with but easyness.
This distinction is well described by Rich Hickey (of Clojure fame) in his "simple made easy" talk. The key point is that simple-complex and easy-hard are two separate axes and that "easy" usually leads to "complex" (the case of x86, I believe) but you can invest some effort in shaping the environment so that "simple" can be "easy".