Swift had/has some problems in the language itself. It's not because of the niche nature of Swift that was the problem iirc.

I don't think this is the right response because certainly a meaningful discussion could've definitely taken place and given how they were already open to other languages which was the reason why they picked Swift in the first place.

I remember Andreas video where he talked about how people used rust in his codebase and they were so happy but later it became very difficult whereas they found with swift that it became easier to manage. That was the reason why they picked swift that time.

Certainly their goal wasn't to pick a popular language (because if that's what you want use python or JS) but rather a language that was relevant to what they were building.

So if D and Ada were relevant or not, that's the main point of discussion imo.