My outside read of the project is that it began losing steam long before iOS brought a large number of new ObjC developers. It was initially riding on the buzz

My outside read of the project is that it began losing steam long before iOS brought a large number of new ObjC developers. It was initially riding on the buzz around NeXT, which generated a lot of excitement around what the future of desktop computing might be (sort of parallel to the buzz around BeOS). And they got some ecosystem help; it was initially an implementation of the circa-1994 OpenStep specification. But NeXT enthusiasm waned through the latter part of the '90s. I remember trying it around the same time as I tried Enlightenment 16, around 2001 or 2002, and at the time the user and development community felt quite small, much less active than E's.