It's better to think of tuple spaces as a concurrency / communications model than an implementation. So it's more like "the actor model" rather than Erlang's or Java/Akka's specific implementation of it. It's more about "if we had this type of system with these constraints and these features, abstracting away these details, what would we gain or lose?". You're right that in the end a good or bad implementation can make or break things (take a look at this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02979), but that's not the point, at least with the original paper.

The interesting thoughts from the paper as far as I can see were: 1) Tuple spaces are programming language or architecture or program independent, and vastly different programs can communicate with each other 2) You don't communicate directly to other agents by address, you write to a topic and read from a topic, which is a form of decoupling producers and consumers 3) The "block when nothing to read in this topic" idea, which makes programming coordination SO easy. I guess it's a bit like unix pipes.

If tuple spaces don't seem that interesting and novel, it's probably because of the benefit of hindsight and that a lot of these ideas are so subsumed into the tools of today. I can't definitively make the claim that Linda is the cause of this, but I suspect it had some effect. I think the original author also had a lot of wacky ideas around "cyberspace" and all that, but that's another deal and I don't think it's why people find the Linda paper interesting now. The closest useful descendants of Linda to be seem to be modern Pub / Sub systems or coordination databases like RabbitMQ, Kafka, Zookeeper.