I didn't work on HyperTalk, but Kevin Calhoun, who worked on HyperCard 2.0 and 3.0, was just around the corner. AppleScript was spun out of a wildly ambitious project spearheaded by Larry Tesler, the head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group, to make end-user programming a reality, but HyperCard and HyperTalk were arguably far more approachable and productive for end users. And in the end it was AppleScript that survived the internal politics while HC/HT were killed.
Genius, really - such an easy to read/understand/use language really freed the professors to teach algorithms, not programming mechanics. And that shit was object-oriented!
It was funny how often our professor would answer "how do I use hypertalk to do ___" with "just write it out" and how often it would work.