1. As your question touches on, it was. The codebase has grown organically from its start as xi-win.
2. The xi-editor project had other problems which I've written about extensively in my retrospective.
3. It's hard to compete against MS VS Code. When I started xi, the competitive landscape had a huge gap between performant and feature-rich but bloated editors.
I agree, but as an emacs user that has tried it multiple times, I really don't "get it".
The main thing that excited me about Xi wasn't Xi itself, but rather that its technology stack could be user to "build your own editor" using a solid foundation. That includes a more modern emacs, vi, vs code, or whatever you like.
2. The xi-editor project had other problems which I've written about extensively in my retrospective.
3. It's hard to compete against MS VS Code. When I started xi, the competitive landscape had a huge gap between performant and feature-rich but bloated editors.
4. We got funding for the font editor project.