You're not wrong, the performance gain from proper FPU instruction scheduling on a Pentium was immense. But applications written prior to Quake and the Pentium gaining prominence or non-game oriented would have needed more blended code generation. Optimizing for the highest end CPU at the time at the cost of the lowest end CPU wouldn't necessarily have been a good idea, unless your lowest CPU was a Pentium. (Which it was for Quake, which was a slideshow on a 486.)

K6 did have the advantage of being OOO, which reduced the importance of instruction scheduling a lot, and having good integer performance. It also had some advantage with 3DNow! starting with K6-2, for the limited software that could use it.