Neovim's goal is remove cruft and shrink the codebase. Adding a terminal emulator, a completely orthogonal feature that makes no sense in a text editor to begin with, is contrary to this goal. They wasted time and worked on the wrong thing.
Vim already allows you to use :shell. Neovim took it a step further with the added benefit that you can treat the output as buffer text. Just because you can't see the advantages this gives developers doesn't mean it was a waste of time.
nilved|9 years ago
tommyallen|9 years ago