The LMI software could have been ported to a 68020+custom MMU instead of the K-Machine but wasn't. I suspect that they didn't have enough staff with experience

The LMI software could have been ported to a 68020+custom MMU instead of the K-Machine but wasn't. I suspect that they didn't have enough staff with experience of low-level coding to be able to see different options, they seem to have been reluctant to do much to extend the microcode (equivalent to assembler) to support things like new ethernet cards, later drivers just worked by read memory word/write memory word function calls from Lisp. Lots of the features of the software only work because everything is in the same address space, working out how to do similar things across multiple address spaces for a modern operating system is much harder. I have talked with RG on Skype but not about historical stuff.