Simplicity of use is what seems important, not necessarily simplicity of design. Though JavaScript is more complicated than C in the sense of having more features, those features generally result in source files that're more succinct and faster to write (since you don't have to, say, roll your own hashtables).
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.
