It also didn’t really perform well at all.

I think the idea was good, but it was simultaneously over-engineered and under-engineered. Over-engineered in that it tried to do too much in too complicated ways. Under-engineered in that they didn't then invest enough in evolving the technical solutions into something more reasonable.

I'd like to see someone try to simplify it into a more workable starting point.

Who knows what the political problems were (Wave was an acquisition), but technically I think it was held back by OT being a poor fit for the front end stack at the time: Google was making most of their webapps in Java compiled to JS.

The modern virtual DOM-diffing approach is a much better fit for OT, and I'd love to see someone try again.

I think they were a little ahead of the curve, it was a unique product and worked for me in a way little else does, interoperability has often been sacrificed for commercial reasons, look at the history of data formats, HTML succeeded because of it's slow growth. Take the flood of frameworks built on PHP and MYSQL to implement database driven websites a lot of wasted time. I think the lesson learnt is to look for an open source project that is closely aligned with your goals and fork it, I see many hundreds of hours of wasted dev on competing approaches to solve the same problems often because of an ideological or system/platform oriented opinion, the successful ones often seem to be a single designers vision who has done a great job of documenting the project with clear code structure to make the job of on-boarding new developers straightforward and make the product appealing to new users.