I really liked the Meego iteration. Its UI was top notch.
How on earth did this not take off ?
Monies. Microsoft's offer to Nokia was way too lucrative.
Meego being a full rewrite and repackage (qt/rpm whereas maemo was gtk/deb), although it had merits, means development needed to restart from scratch.
Nokia also totally mismanaged dev relations. First it built up dev excitement for Maemo, then announced it was going to be abandoned (for Meego) a few months later.
Meego was a combination of Intel's Moblin (purchased from OpenedHand, a big Linux shop back in the day) and Nokia's Maemo.
Shortly after Intel abandoned the project in favor of Tizen, leaving Nokia holding the bag. Nokia went through the motions until the infamous burning platform memo, driving the last nail.
In some ways, N900/N9 is a parallel with Amiga. Great machine, tremendous excitement by a (small) loyal userbase, mismanaged by development, and now a subject of nostalgia and failed attempts to resurrect the dream.
unfortunately, unlike sailfish, tizen lacks support for android apps. the reason for that is that samsung would loose its commercial android license if they added android support to tizen.
Nokia owned Qt and Samsung didn't want to pay fees or buy Qt outright, so they went with the mostly unknown Linux Enlightenment project (didn't hurt that it's main dev worked for them at the time). Likewise, Nokia owned rights to SwipeUI, so they opted for a remake of the Android UI.
If they'd gone with something like a cleanroom implementation of SwipeUI or webOS, I think Tizen could have been a success. Instead, it just feels like a bad, outdated edition of Android. If users wanted that, they'd just use Android instead.