Quads and biquadratic texture mapping truly were an awful choice and it's incredible that the company still pulled through. I have an NV1 floating around somewhere; I should dust it off again.

I'm familiar enough with the history, but I really have to wonder why quads were pursued. It seems like even at the time, triangles were the obvious long-term bet. Of course it's never quite that obvious at the time, but nevertheless quads seem like one of those weird tech offshoots that are simply too different to ever get traction, like ternary arithmetic. And the trajectory of transistor counts was such that per-pixel division for perfect perspective correctness was simply inevitable.