To your last point, the social/etc component of success always seems to be overlooked on HN. The world is littered with good solutions to problems that simply failed to get traction for various complex social reasons. There doesn’t have to be a technical reason something was not adopted widely. It could be fine, great even, and still just not get traction. I would bet everyone can name a piece of software they use that is not really popular at all, and everyone else uses something else that is popular, but this unpopular software really solves a problem that they have and they just like it.

Software never was a technical meritocracy.

There does not have to have been anything technically wrong with D for it to not have been widely adopted. I think HN doesn’t like that because it often means that there’s nothing obvious they can necessarily do to fix it