Not sure I'd call Acme a big part of Plan 9, though it does follow the philosophy somewhat. I know folks who use 9front who would rather spend time in the Sam editor than use Acme, and they use 9front as their daily driver system.

But I totally agree with you on the "do something weird" approach to learning and gaining inspiration. Some problems that are hard in some spaces are extremely easy to deal with in others.

I actually do use acme on 9front for a lot of coding tasks in conjunction with sshnet (imagine importing a remote system's network accessibility over ssh - like a lightweight VPN-almost sorta) and sshfs through that sshnet "tunnel".

This gives me a nice code, compile, test cycle that has some "editing" commands that let me jump straight to where failures occur with a single click.

And Acme knows nothing about what it's doing... it simply follows its own basic rules, and the file system underneath is arranged to enable my workflow.