I heard this story about how the simplification of one particular character went wrong and they had to abandon the chosen replacement and go back to the original one.
The character is a 16-stroke character, 雕 diāo / to sculpt (radical: short-tailed bird 隹 zhuī).
The Language Reform Committee went for 刁 diāo, which is a two-stroke character, sounds exactly like 雕, and looks like 刀 dāo / knife (thus retaining the sculpting element of 雕).
A seemingly perfect replacement.
The next day, someone published a picture of a bust of Mao Zedong on the front page of the newspaper, with the caption:
毛主席的刁像
The original, traditional-script version would've been 毛主席的雕像 (Máo zhǔxí de diāoxiàng / Chairman Mao's sculpted image).
刁 means sly / cunning, so the new, simplified-script version 毛主席的刁像 (Máo zhǔxí de diāoxiàng) could be interpreted as "Chairman Mao's sly image".
The clever opportunist was quick to use this one-off chance of punning on it without getting arrested.
For some reason, the Committee had overlooked the meaning of 刁 and the role it could play in terms of the potential damage it could cause.
The two-stroke replacement version 刁 diāo was withdrawn, with the 16-stroke original 雕 retained to this day.
(China)
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