Conceptually simple linear-time suffix tree constructions In 1973 Weiner gave the first linear-time construction of suffix trees. The algorithm was simplified in 1976 by McCreight, and in 1995 by Ukkonen. Nevertheless, I find Ukkonen's algorithm relatively involved conceptually.

Has there been simplifications to Ukkonen's algorithm since 1995?
I'm not sure if there were any new results directly simplifying the construction of suffix trees. However, there has been at least one result giving a very simple algorithm for constructing suffix arrays in linear time.

Note that there's more than a conceptual equivalence between these two data structures, since you can use a suffix array (with $\cal{O}(1)$ time for querying the longest common prefix) to build an equivalent suffix tree. This should be a relatively simple exercise, but I can give more details if required.

Also, for practical purposes it's even easier to build suffix arrays in $\cal{O}(n \lg n)$ time, but I guess I'm going slightly off-topic here.