"I look at the feature set of Swift, and I have to ask myself the question: what’s the point? What is really trying to be solved? And does it provide significant benefits over languages that already exist?"

One reason may be that large companies want ownership of a modern, C#/Java/Go-like language [1]. I was an intern at Adobe when it was trying to develop such a language (ActionScript 4) + VM, and a primary reason not to adopt an existing language is that they wanted control and to be free of legacy baggage as much as possible. Obj-C is reasonable to use today, but its C and Smalltalk underpinnings sometimes feel like anachronisms for people writing App Store apps. This is probably especially true if you're a language designer like Chris Lattner at Apple and are tasked with fixing the most prominent pain points that your language users face.

[1] I realize these are somewhat diverse languages.