The Dylan folks were all trained computer scientists, mostly MIT PhDs, almost all with years and even decades of experience in writing garbage collected languages on resource-constrained machines (e.g. MACLISP). By contrast many of the apps you write are written by much less trained folks using a lot of automation and boilerplate.
While I personally prefer to write tight, clean code directly to the underlying system, I am really glad for this democratization of programming which has lead not only to good careers for people who didn't get to go to MIT/CMU/UCB but also lead to a profusion of great apps. Not everybody has to design TCP but everybody gets to use it.
And note that Dylan had little impact on society while Tinder sure has.
Don't know what I was thinking.
But it also means there's some relatively low-hanging fruit these days if you find a niche where performance is much more important than accessibility :)
I never dreamed that software developers would manage to make things slower still (by orders of magnitude) by throwing everything onto the 'net and using multiple round-trip web-api calls to do the most trivial things. I just didn't anticipate that this source of inefficiency was there to be harnessed.
(This came to a head for me recently when I was trying out planner apps for my phone. It boggled my mind that, even on a dual 1.8 GHz processor, Asana and MS Planner do not respond instantly.)