Sometimes, the newer, simpler languages are new versions of the older, more byzantine languages. I think that's basically the Perl 6 approach, for instance.
It's like sketching with pencil. Your first version is complicated and gets a lot wrong, with stray lines all about. The final one is cleaned up and simple, yet that simplicity is a direct result of that messy progenitor.
It's called "evolution", in some circles.