Well, Pascal had plenty of flaws too, not just excessive simplicity. From day one the only way to do almost anything non-trivial in Pascal was to abuse variant

Well, Pascal had plenty of flaws too, not just excessive simplicity. From day one the only way to do almost anything non-trivial in Pascal was to abuse variant records as a way to do typecasts. The I/O library was horrible, but standardized as part of the language - e.g. there was no standard way to open a named file, and the only way to close any file was to reopen it (via reset/write) to a temporary file which would have the side effect of closing the original one. In the event there was no standardized (vs proprietary) meaningful improvement to Pascal (ISO Pascal basically just added poorly thought out "conformant arrays"), and Wirth himself just moved on and designed a new language instead - Modula-2, which was an improvement but also not great, then abandoned that in favor of Oberon.