I would highly recommend Jean E. Sammet’s “Early History of Cobol” for this. She was the chair of two of the committees that developed COBOL, and served on a third.
(If I might take a moment here to debunk a very widespread urban legend: although many other women had a direct role in the development of COBOL, Grace Hopper did not. Sammet credits Hopper with having published the concept of “verbs��� and “nouns” in computer programs in 1955, pointing the way toward a definition of a data structure separate from the program code. Hopper also served as one of the “advisors to the Executive Committee” of CODASYL, which voted to begin the project. Sammet describes this executive committee as “not directly involved with the technical creation of COBOL.” The committees doing that work submitted reports on their progress to the Executive Committee. Hopper did write FLOW-MATIC, one of the precursors to COBOL, and another, AIMACO, was based on her work.)
According to Sammet, people began complaining that the language was too complicated as soon as the committee on statement syntax had met, and gives the first documented example of this complaint:
During the August 17–19[, 1959] meeting, there was a great deal of discussion about the validity, usefulness, etc., of what the committee had done so far. Some people felt it showed much too much the result of a design by a committee and embodied too many compromises. Others felt it was better than the three main existing languages which had been considered [...] Some people felt the new language had gone too far, i.e. was too complex (e.g. subscripts) whereas others felt it was too simple (e.g. lack of formulas). Considerable discussion centered around the idea that each manufacturer might implement only a subset; this concept was discarded because of the recognition of what that would mean for portability (although that word was never used).
One reason Sammet gives for this was
While much technical work was going on, the politics were not buried. Because this was probably the first attempt by competitive computer manufacturers to work together for a common goal, the marketing considerations of all groups were extremely relevant. [...] All said in essence that they would implement this new language “but”—and then each manufacturer had some constraint to go along with the “but.”
One example of this comes to mind, because another answer claimed the differences between COBOL and Fortran were because of the differences between scientific and business computing. There’s some truth to that, but Semmet openly confesses that, no, they intentionally did everything differently from how IBM did it because of corporate politics. Most members of the committees were IBM’s smaller competitors, and they saw COBOL as their chance to catch up to IBM’s advantage in the marketplace. So, straight from the horse’s mouth:
I felt there was a strong anti-IBM bias in this committee from me, and from some (but certainly not all) of the others. Since I was not working for IBM at the time, I can freely (although not with pride) admit that in some cases suggestions or decisions were made on the basis of doing things differently from how IBM did it. For example, we felt that the verb for loop control should not be called
DObecause that was how FORTRAN did it.