I don't think it is that odd, it's just a case of costs, scale and who you're designing for. A TOPS500 computer is gonna set you back a few million $, so you'r

I don't think it is that odd, it's just a case of costs, scale and who you're designing for. A TOPS500 computer is gonna set you back a few million $, so you're only going to have one of them and it's economic to employ a team of well qualified people to write software and interface relatively directly with the hardware. Now that same computing power can be purchased by ~anyone and most of those people are not specialists and have essentially no ability to write software for the platform, so (from a design perspective) it's a waste of time designing an interface that allows them to do so. If your goal is to have a small powerful platform aimed at people who want to run software on it directly that's completely doable. Just see the raspberry pi and the raft of similar devices now available.