Ive always thought getting kids to write code on the prior generations of Pi was the fastest way to turn them off programming. Kids aren’t stupid, they can tell the computer is horrifically slow and not much fun to use as a desktop computer.

It’s a truly terrible development desktop machine. It’s great fun for deploying the projects you built on a even vaguely modern other computer that doesn’t lag just dragging an IDE window around, but I sure as heck wouldn’t want to actually develop the code on it.

I’m curious to see if the extra power offered by the 4 meaningfully changes this, but I don’t think it’s going to change my own habits.

Then why wasn't that ready with version 1?

You're correct that it was originally an edu tool. It isn't anymore.