It is very unlikely that you can use Plan 9 with the video card literally in text mode.

>When I tried to run Plan 9 in a VM I gave up because I couldn't figure out how to open a shell in the window manager and type ls.

You can probably learn how by reading the first few paragraphs of this page:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Using_rio/index.html

It was not obvious to Rob Pike (who if not the "leader" of Plan 9 was at least the developer with the highest status).

Pike seemed to lack an understanding of how to entice users whose motivations and interests are different from his own to go through the trouble of actually learning and acclimating to his software. A general lack of marketing savvy, perhaps.

Here is another example of that:

In an post to the plan 9 mailing list (9fans) written in the 1990s, Pike seemed genuinely confused as to why some browser maker (Opera maybe?) did not respond positively to Pike's invitation to port their browser to Plan 9.

This was at a time when on a really good day Plan 9 had fewer than 200 users (most of whom were researchers at Bell Labs and maybe coworkers of those researchers). "I never even received the courtesy of a reply," is how Pike ended the post.

I did not mean to focus so long on one personality. The important point is that there's a lot of things one has to pay attention to if one expects a particular piece of software to gain widespread adoption. In particular, it is not enough to show that you are a very impressive person surrounded by other impressive people with some very innovative idea.