> The range of problems it says they want to tackle is huge:
If they incorporate all that into one program, it will be (an unusable mess OR so damn complex that a small percentage of users will ever tackle it) AND it will quickly fall behind whatever bleeding edge they're wanting to stick to.
For evidence, I give you: Eclipse, the ultimate do-everything IDE. It's awesome until you realize how much unmaintained cruft there is in there. Which doesn't mean you can't get things done with it, but don't expect bleeding edge on a lot of things that started out that way.
That seems likely to be true if the approach is to build separate features to achieve all of those goals. Looking at the research papers they've cited in this thread, however, I don't think that's where this is heading -- I'd say it looks more like Excel (which is already the current [figuratively, not specifically quantitatively] 80% solution for the first second and third items, and explicitly the thing addressed by the first) built on a better foundation that unites the existing strengths of the dataflow paradigm implicit in spreadsheets with a strong theoretical basis that unites it with relational + temporal data in a way which also greatly reduces the need to escape out to alternative programming models (e.g., in existing Excel, VBA etc.)
Its still a challenge -- getting the UI right especially -- but its not particularly hard to see from the cited research how a tool built on that foundation that could do what they are saying, with the only specialization to the separate goals being UI affordances rather than separate basic functionality.
If they incorporate all that into one program, it will be (an unusable mess OR so damn complex that a small percentage of users will ever tackle it) AND it will quickly fall behind whatever bleeding edge they're wanting to stick to.
For evidence, I give you: Eclipse, the ultimate do-everything IDE. It's awesome until you realize how much unmaintained cruft there is in there. Which doesn't mean you can't get things done with it, but don't expect bleeding edge on a lot of things that started out that way.