Simplicity is definitely a goal. These days, not a day goes by on the Rust team in which we don't discuss ways to simplify the language.

My colleague Dave Herman always says that language design goes through cycles: You identify a problem, add solutions to fix it, then discover that these solutions are best merged with some other ideas. The result is that, as a language evolves, complexity goes up and down. I think that we're coming off a peak of complexity and the language is going to evolve toward simplicity in the near term.

Just to name a few simple examples, removing the alias analysis pass and removing "native modules" are some simplifications that mostly have consensus at this point.