Since I design processors for Smalltalk I am certainly in favor of the ideas you present.

I think the main thing that kept Plan 9 from becoming popular was that AT&T tried to make money on it at a time when Linux was already a big thing. By the time they gave up and open sourced it several of its unique features had been included in Linux.

Squeak is not implemented in C but in a restricted subset of Smalltalk (called Slang) which can be easily translated to C. But since it is Smalltalk it can be tested using Squeak's nice development tools instead of gdb or similar.

Although Lisp machines were more commercially successful, there were many interesting Smalltalk machine projects as I pointed out in these slides:

http://www.merlintec.com/download/2019_slides_jecel_fast1v2....