Interesting. When we decided to build ht we didn't compare it to expect (which I hadn't heard of or used) but I'm comparing the two now as they seem related.

How exactly did `expect` fall over?

From what I can tell, expect does not provide the functionality of a stateful terminal server/client under the hood for you so it isn't as easy to grab "text" screenshots of a Terminal User Interface, which is one of the main motivations behind ht (will update the readme to make this main use-case more clear)