I am pleased to see that TeX actually kept getting simpler as it kept growing, because the new features blended with the old ones. I was constantly bombarded by ideas for extensions, and I was constantly turning a deaf ear to everything that did not fit well with TeX as I conceived it at the time. Thus TeX converged, rather than diverged, to its final form. By acting as an extremely conservative filter, and by believing that the system was always complete, I was perhaps able to save TeX from the 'creeping featurism' that destroys systems whose users are allowed to introduce a patchwork of loosely connected ideas.