Yeah I definitely didn't see it being production ready any time soon, but I thought it was an interesting project for people that wanted to learn BEAM internals. That's how I got started with it at least, I had problems trying to contribute BEAM just because of the sheer size of the codebase and lacking the domain specific knowledge.

I do think that having alternative implementations is good for experimentation though, similar to how Ruby was improved upon ideas from JRuby and Rubinius, even if most users never used those two directly.