Yeah, Bret always seemed quite defensive about Dynamicland being his Next Big Thing, incubating it in semi secret, sharing things only when they're ready, trying to follow some top-down timeline of the next 50 years, etc.
I guess he genuinely believes(d?) that he's building the next printing press or something like that, and therefore any tiny bit of interference could be detrimental to his grand vision.
For a while there were many, many more people excited and interested about Dynamicland than there were opportunities to actually try it and experiment with it. If you were genuinely excited about the vision, but 1) didn't live near Oakland and 2) didn't know people there who could let you in, there was no way for you to interact with the project. It's always a shame when that energy just dissipates without becoming productive.
In my opinion, if Dynamicland had been open source from the start, shared with as many as possible, so that enterprising teachers/librarians/hobbyists could've had deployed it themselves, maybe it'd have had a greater chance of truly morphing into something big.
More like what folk.computer is doing now, although maybe it's a bit too late now that that initial lift is gone.
But what do I know, I'm just a guy on the internet.