Based on my 4 decades long involvement  in and exposure to numerous database systems, in this talk I will  discuss how various factors led multiple systems to be evolved in ways  that made them become more complex in terms of their design as well as  their usability aspects.While simplicity of design and architecture  might be a highly desirable objective, there will invariably be  conflicting requirements that lead to complexity creeping in, at least  with respect to the internals of such systems. Examples of such  requirements relate to the cloud environment, performance,  availability, heterogeneity in terms of supported hardware, operating  systems and programming language environments, accommodation of  multiple workload types, extensibility, etc. It is also the case that  aiming for simplicity in one aspect of system design might cause  complexity to be introduced in other areas. A case in point is the  desire for the near elimination of the need for DBAs and tuning knobs  in the cloud environment which makes the internals of such systems  become much more complex so that they could dynamically detect and  react to different workload types that such systems might be used for.  While KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) might be a desirable design  principle, following it mindlessly might result in the kiss of death  with respect to performance and reliability!