Stuck in what way? It would have been easy for Apple to make an "Objective-C without the C", where it's still using message passing and the Foundation libraries, but without header files, raw pointers, and all the @messy @syntax. Add little goodies like auto-stringification of enums and so on. I think that kind of superficial cleanup would have been enough to modernize the language. They could have spent the rest of all the time that Swift has consumed on better dev tooling.