Wow! This is so fateful! I happen to be looking for a proofreader & spell-checker. Are you available? How much do you charge? What are your thoughts on the Oxford comma?
I've had the chance to talk a bit with Bill Atkinson about this. I think there are a few things at play here.
First, HC was built before the popularization of the internet, and as such a distribution model for stacks didn't really exist. I can literally remember mailing stacks on floppy disks. So, people could make things, but not easily share them.
Second, there was a fundamental shift in which software became a commodity. I really think in the beginning it was about selling computers; it took a while for people to realize that software was not a 'value add' for the machine but a place to make much, much more money.
So when HC was conceived, it seemed natural to provide a tool to let people author their own software. As the business model changed, this idea lost out. Software should be something that people bought, not something people made