The problem is that D community keeps pivoting all the time, so now you get compiled C# with the breath of .NET ecosystem and IDE tooling, and is almost impossible to sell D, even if still has the edge in a few language features.
I'm not talking about merging .NET into D I'm talking about instead of building Vala which transpiles to C, the creators of Vala could have just made a D library instead. D does not need the .NET ecosystem to survive.
D needs a usable ecosystem, the point is that since Andrei Alexandrescu's book came out, the incomplete pivots have allowed the competition to get most of D features where it had an edge back 15 years ago.
Even Andrei eventually got back to C++, now working at NVidia.
Native AOT or .NET Native, plus all the Midori related improvements, and everything else C# has access to, was one example, there are others from other ecosystems.
