The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) grew out of a recognized need for improved resource discovery of web resources. Initial work on the DCMES focused on the requirement of simplicity: "ordinary" users should be able to formulate descriptive records based on a relatively simple schema (fifteen free-text elements). Over the years there has been a movement within the Dublin Core community to use the DCMES for more complex and specialized resource description tasks and, correspondingly, develop mechanisms for incorporating such complexity within the basic element set. This work has generally been called qualified Dublin Core. We examine the notion of accommodating complexity in a simple metadata model and argue that the dual requirements are incompatible. We discuss the role of events and processes in more expressive metadata and how simple resource-centric models, such as DCMES, are not equipped to express these semantics