"the people who did the work, did this" is basically the answer to most things, and I think here you're right - ultimately, working on X sucked and more people

"the people who did the work, did this" is basically the answer to most things, and I think here you're right - ultimately, working on X sucked and more people were willing to rewrite a whole new windowing system than to keep working on X. There is some interesting reasoning behind that (which I will let more learned people expand on) but since I'm not doing the work I'm pretty zen about just accepting the decisions of the people who did.