I wished Hypercard was the BASIC of Macintosh. However, when I tried to build something with it (a manager for the offline game Car Wars), I quickly ran into some trivial obstacle, and was told that I'd have to write a C extension. (iirc, it was the lack of a random number generator.) Enough of that.
Hypercard was mostly useful as a sort of personal wiki or address card book; I used it quite a bit as a notepad with hyperlinks. It didn't die for any real dramatic reasons. It was programmatically stuck in the 9" B&W Mac era and never quite fit onto larger color screens, so once the web came around, Apple dropped it.
Also you history is way off, because BASIC morphed into VisualBasic, which did everything Hypercard could and ten times more, and was the leading programming environment for a generation.
Similarly, you had to do a lot of peeks and pokes in most 8bit BASICs to really get at the machine. But you could still do something reasonably worthwhile. I don't want to imply that you could do everything. The main idea is simply that you could do quite a bit, and it really did look and feel decent compared to apps of the day. As the systems got more advanced, it became harder or perhaps just less of a priority to empower your average novice.
I've never thought of VB being for an ordinary joe in the same way builtin BASICs were -- it was more of a macro language for Office, and a platform specific COBOL, not an entry-level environment. But I don't have enough direct experience -- perhaps I'm wrong about that...
Hypercard was mostly useful as a sort of personal wiki or address card book; I used it quite a bit as a notepad with hyperlinks. It didn't die for any real dramatic reasons. It was programmatically stuck in the 9" B&W Mac era and never quite fit onto larger color screens, so once the web came around, Apple dropped it.
Also you history is way off, because BASIC morphed into VisualBasic, which did everything Hypercard could and ten times more, and was the leading programming environment for a generation.