Termkit showed great promised but the progress of the project fizzled out later. Technical limitations maybe ? Because definitely not lack of contribution. This had a lot of eyeballs
People just did not adopt them for other projects.
The thing that most people will possibly never understand is that the reason people do things is generally not rational. And often the better an idea is, the less likely it is to be adopted soon. So the fact that something doesn't become popular does NOT mean it doesn't have technical merit or legs. Actually it often means the opposite.
Humans, including programmers, are very similar to sheep. And I don't mean that in a joking way. I mean literally their behavior, including what tools they use for programming, is largely decided subconsciously by the activity of the other humans around them.