It still kills me that Adobe reneged on their promise of a free Display PostScript license, thus killing Rhapsody and "Yellow Box" for Windows (and it's still hilarious to me that that colour was named for Bill Gate's rude response when asked if Microsoft would develop software for NeXT, "Develop for it? I'll p** on it."
Check his interview on "ADSP: The Podcast",
https://adspthepodcast.com/2021/05/21/Episode-26.html
https://adspthepodcast.com/2021/05/28/Episode-27.html
https://adspthepodcast.com/2021/06/04/Episode-28.html
As for Rhapsody and "Yellow Box" for Windows dying, not sure if it would make a difference, OpenSTEP also did not work out that well, not even for Sun, other than being an influence to Java and Java EE (originally an Objective- C framework).
By the way, my graduation thesis was porting an OpenGL based particle engine from Objective-C/NeXTSTEP into C++/Windows 95, because the university department was getting rid of their Cubes, at this time there were no hopes for NeXT.
The notable NeXT code considerations at Adobe are:
- they lost the source code to Glenn Reid's nifty "TouchType.app" - they couldn't be bothered to revive the NeXT source code for Altsys Virtuoso which Macromedia Freehand was based on
"NeXT meeting strategy"
https://youtu.be/KRBIH0CA7ZU
Or for a bigger overview,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449912
However you're right, it is one of the best mixtures from both worlds.
Xerox PARC did port their environments into UNIX, Mesa/Cedar, Interlisp and Smalltalk, but it was already too late to make a difference.