Because Pharo is an environment and tool designed and built by those who want to build Pharo.
While there are certainly folks doing other things in it, the Pharo project focuses on the problems of improving the Pharo project to make it easier to develop Pharo.
As with many OSS projects, the developers are there to scratch their itches, which is Pharo, not just random programming projects.
You'd like to think that these goals, improving the development experience, would be generic enough to "lift all boats". I mean, they do solve a lot of issues with Smalltalk distributed development, distribution, source code control, etc. But, to be honest, those are all advanced cases and, while part of the development experience, don't do much to attract developers who are doing distribute "IDE" development.
I've tried several times to work with Pharo as a tool for random GUI apps, and found the experience quite frustrating. But, clearly, the Pharo developers continue to make progress, its just that whatever their destination is, it's not congruent with mine, so I dabble and leave.
If you want a more friendly approach to Smalltalk (which, you'll note, Pharo does not claim to be -- there's no mention of Smalltalk on their front page), then take a look at Squeak.
squeak is very similar to pharo (which is based on squeak) but pharo is a lot more user-friendly and looks nicer. they are both smalltalks - i agree that pharo trying to pretend otherwise is a bit strange.
Or similar to Perl => Raku. The Pharo developers took a wise decision renaming it. Because if you keep the same name, people expect nothing short of total backward compatibility with whatever there was before. If one wants to keep the option to experiment and eventually break backward compatibility, it's better to rename it.
While there are certainly folks doing other things in it, the Pharo project focuses on the problems of improving the Pharo project to make it easier to develop Pharo.
As with many OSS projects, the developers are there to scratch their itches, which is Pharo, not just random programming projects.
You'd like to think that these goals, improving the development experience, would be generic enough to "lift all boats". I mean, they do solve a lot of issues with Smalltalk distributed development, distribution, source code control, etc. But, to be honest, those are all advanced cases and, while part of the development experience, don't do much to attract developers who are doing distribute "IDE" development.
I've tried several times to work with Pharo as a tool for random GUI apps, and found the experience quite frustrating. But, clearly, the Pharo developers continue to make progress, its just that whatever their destination is, it's not congruent with mine, so I dabble and leave.
If you want a more friendly approach to Smalltalk (which, you'll note, Pharo does not claim to be -- there's no mention of Smalltalk on their front page), then take a look at Squeak.