Yes simplicity is always important, but it does not equate easiness. The axe of simple to complex is independent of the axe of easy to hard. It may be easy to apply patterns blindly to your codebass and make it complex. Just how it is easy to write naive and simple code that then becomes difficult to work with.

The mark of a good programmer is to balance all of these so that it’s easy to work with the codebase on an ongoing basis. And more often than not it’s similar to the sketching process. At each stage, you get enough feedback to judge the right direction for the next iteration. You do not start with all the details, nor with careless doodling. But one aspect that is often overlooked with artists is how often they practice to get that judgement capability.

"At each stage, you get enough feedback to judge the right direction for the next iteration."

Depends on the project I would say. What do you do, if all of a sudden the requirements change again? Or the plattform evolved/degraded? Then you compromise - and I can better compromise with simple solution. And I would never claim simple equals easy. Rather the opposite. Like you said, it is easy to make complex things. Also I never applied design patterns for the sake of it(even though it might have sounded like it) KISS was part of the theories as well.. but I did value emphasized cleverness too much as I thought that this is the way it is supposed to be done.

My resume is: simple direct solutions are to be prefered and trying to be clever is not very clever.

I rather have 3 lines of code, than one compressed clever one, no one can understand the first time reading it. And the same goes for the bigger design picture.