I don't see the break? "Clay" tooling exists for "industrial" code, but as secret sauce, and jig kludgery, and various other "making this more broadly available is not in/of our interest". "Clay"'s rejection of "industrial" has seemed more resource-starved exploit-not-explore group-think. Smalltalk/forth/etc audacious-scope rewrite-the-world efforts have seemed more "remake the world" than "to force us to remake ourselves". Try imaging a forth implementation effort that said "ok, we have bootstrap... so now the next obvious steps are supporting PICs and multiple dispatch and template jit, WAM and BEAM vms, linking Z3 solver, DHM type inference, ...". So perhaps rather than an inherent break between modes, and balancing to be done, there's a lack of available power, and of interests/resources aligned with ramping it.
But then, I'd like a programming environment which provides an powerful environment for making engineering tradeoffs, rather than ones which hardwire in very dramatic ones. I expect such an environment, when it finally exists, won't be hard to recognize. As, for example, basic reimplementation of existing modern languages, with their big test suites, libraries, community repos, specs sometimes transliteratable directly into code, code-as-documentation and highly-investment-in optimization, is a natural forcing-factor exercise for such an environment. So when you see a small team spewing new language implementations... maybe we've at long last hit phase transition. And if one can't easily manage that, in bulk, even with all that leverage... then it's not a very powerful environment, is it?
Additionally, there is a specific kind of dominant "computing culture" that we live in. Show a new language to mainstream developers and they will want to know how to do a "hello world" and which text editor / command line program to run in order to use it, as if these are the only ways to interact with a machine in any meaningful way. Anything outside of this seems like it's "not real programming".