I've had a similar experience, and generally agree with what you're saying. But I am glad Swift was created. All the plebs gravitate towards that language, so Objective-C remains unpolluted. I shudder to think how Objective-C would have deteriorated without Steve around.
Hardly given that all Objective-C features since Objective-C 2.0 were aimed at improving the Swift interoperability story, as Chris Lattner has mentioned in a couple of interviews.
They were aware of Swift, and decided to make the upcoming OpenGL replacement framework in Objective-C instead of Swift, and only provide Swift bindings instead of doing it the other way around, implemented in Swift with Objective-C bindings for compatibility with "legacy" code.
Who is "they"? Chris Lattner works on compilers under Developer Tools. The Swift and Objective-C teams share an office and are often the same people. Of course Objective-C is going to get new features to help import it into Swift, because the whole point of Swift was to make a new language that worked well with the old one. Basically nobody outside that group had any need to know of the language at that point, especially since it wasn't ready for system use anyways. I would not be surprised if the first time most of the Metal team even knew Swift existed was when Craig introduced it on stage at WWDC.
It's been 10 years and I haven't had any issues. Maybe in another 10 years this will be enough of a problem to switch, but by that point I'll be retired
