It's a challenge game companies have had for a long time.

Sometimes, being bold means trying new architectures... But the important thing is making sure they are easy to adopt.

That's the irony of the 'lesson' of the PS3 being hard to develop for; Sega learned that one the hard way with the Saturn.

I guess that’s my question, was the Cell fundamentally bad or was it just too new, different and hard to adopt?

If it’s the latter then building the PS4 on the cell as well should have been fine as by that point it’s a well-known and well-understood architecture.

Even if it's well-understood, being fundamentally different than the other platforms is still a cost for anyone not exclusively making Playstation titles.

The Cell was poorly suited for video games — video games don’t have much in the way of highly parallelizable, discrete tasks. Games, even modern ones, generally want fewer, higher-clocked cores — something like Threadripper would be of little benefit.