Granted it makes some amount of sense. But the issue is that with EPIC you still can address every part of the processor unless you want to continue to grow the instruction. So you end up having to do OoO anyway but you just made it much more complex and hard to reason about.

I'm not a chip designer but is what I understood to be one of the issues.

Also if this compiler stuff wasn't jet written, unlike with RISC where people at Standford showed successful compilation for RISC already before people even developed any high performance RISC chips.

I don't want to claim I'm smarter then those people, clear all the people working on these VLIW processor were a lot smarter then me. But then again many smart people worked on Alpha and they didn't go the VLIW route.