That's how I remember it too, but I think the expectations of simplicity has changed over the years - in those days, it was closer to great defaults and no gratuitous features, whereas now it's a bit more like less flexibility (although really, Firefox has masses of options that aren't included in the UI but are accessible from about:config, so I don't really think Firefox falls victim to this criticism).

Part of the old tradeoff was that extension writers could do almost anything to make the web browser do almost anything. Nowadays, extensions are much less flexible. I think for good reason: being able to click a few buttons and get pwned isn't really a desirable feature. But the tradeoff has moved. I don't think that's really an argument against Firefox, but consider that powerusers are often very conservative, I'm not surprised that it caused some disagreement.