I honestly worry that the relevance of text-based systems is largely tied with literacy and how it interacts with the player's imagination -- something largely in decline, at least in the US.

It's not just imagination the relevance is also tied to focus and attention. I have multiple friends who claim that the reason they don't read is because are "visual learners" .

The real truth is they have a 30 second attention span and can't finish a page without daydreaming so in order to stay focussed they need a YouTube video than contains the same information but with constant visual changes.

Sadly, you're not wrong... It might not get off the ground, but if we're able to, we'll give it a shot.