I suppose I meant that they probably were bit ahead of their time and overly ambitious. Performance and especially latency are critically important for interactive applications. The designers must have been fully aware of the performance characteristics and hardware limitations at the time, but still they decided to ship such system. Maybe they should have taken a look in the mirror and notice that the hardware is not ready for what they were making and downscaled it to fit, then incrementally grow those features back when they become more practical.
The goal was not to have a fast vi, for writing applications in a slow way. If you wanted vi, there were other systems.
It was a system for research of development of advanced software, often with complex GUIs. Symbolics sold for several years into the CAD and 3d-graphics markets.
