I’m only guessing but I think it has to do with mechanisms for function/method composition.
Anyway, for the first question, I like to think of it in terms of benefit-over-cost ratio. The cost to reimplement Tidal in SC would be high. The benefit would be to have a replica of something that someone else already did, which probably doesn’t function as well as the original = relatively small benefit. So I think it would not be worth doing. It would be worthwhile to spend that time on an innovative project that goes in a different direction (for example, Alga: interpolating live coding environment).
hjh