For me, personally, the value was in have something similar to a window manager for the terminal. As I was constantly spawning, killing, and reorganizing panes, a tiling-based approach gave me more control over my terminal and allowed me to perform complex operations without having to memorize or execute multiple commands. My use of a terminal is not static and therefore having a more dynamic option made my life easier.
This is really just a personal project that I wanted to share in case others might like to try it.
I will add that, especially at the time of creation, I was heavily in the 'unix is my IDE' camp. A terminal window manager was a logical next step to that notion. As someone called out below, I even used `ed` as my main editor for a while (which was as bad as it sounds).