A separate, contained server to run programs that can't talk to anything else is sort of against the whole Plan 9 idea, it's basically what Pike is complaining

A separate, contained server to run programs that can't talk to anything else is sort of against the whole Plan 9 idea, it's basically what Pike is complaining about here. All you did was turn a Plan 9 into a dumb terminal and NAS. Why would I do that when I could ditch the Plan 9 box and save money just by having the Linux machine, which apparently was needed for running everything in the first place. The idea of Plan 9 was not to have no user applications running on it.