I can understand why he enjoyed building mathematical models. And why reviews of "Balance of the Planet" praised that. But assuming that was the point, I think missed the point.
I think it would be like creating Demons Souls, loving creating the back story, getting lots of praise for it, and deciding that the best thing is an interactive fiction game with nothing but unlimited detail back story. Then wondering some years later why you didn't change the world, no one has gone further than you did, and all games seem shallow compared to your imagination. Fortunately Miyazaki went a different way.
Not a surprise that Will Wright and Sid Meier (who I know is very much a fan of complexity theory) went in a more successful direction.
"Why have I failed? ... The simple answer is that ... I’m too far ahead of my time... I’m a misunderstood genius. ... the world doesn’t yet perceive a need for the ideas I peddle. In 1885, physicists didn’t perceive a need for special relativity, and they would have rejected it out of hand."
Or... you're wrong.
[In the movie "Matrix"] "Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. I see the same thing when I look at the real world."
I've been following his work for years, And spoken to people who have been to his 'conference' (and who I suspect will be rather bemused by the way he described them here!). The general consensus was it's horribly self-referential impracticality.
There is a reason he hasn't made anything practical in 35 years. Since the time when his success at 80s game development made him think it was the wrong thing that caused the success. (Hint: it was not his ad-hoc mathematical models, no matter how much post-doc justification he can ladle on them).
I have wondered about him, but sadly this post is rather damning in my eyes.
All languages have compound lexemes. And all languages can use description to disambiguate.
The balance in toki pona is at a dramatically different point to English, which has a relatively large functional vocabulary. But it isn't a difference in kind. And most conlangs, in my experience, rely more on compounds than English.
The "Badly" at the end seems to drop your comment from curious bafflement to prejudice. Why would it be bad?
toki pona has a reduced vocabulary. It builds more complex concepts that other languages have lexemes for as compounds, and these are somewhat standard, though more flexible than in other languages ('tomo tawa' is almost always the way to say 'car'). All languages do this, of course, e.g. a firefly / lightning bug, but toki pona does it more.
Most people would understand 'tomo tawa li utala e mi' to mean a car hit me, unless the context indicated otherwise (e.g. we're discussing trains). If it really mattered that it was a private passenger vehicle and not a bus, or some other kind of vehicle, you'd have to say more. But if I said 'I was hit by a vehicle', you wouldn't necessarily need to know exactly what kind. You would probably infer that I didn't mean an aircraft.
Part of the zen of toki pona is realising how little you need to specify.
And again, this happens to a lesser extent in other languages. You typically don't specify pronouns with Japanese verbs, relying on the context, with the occasional explicit pronoun as a topic marker (which Japanese language learners from, say, English, use much more often than native speakers).
I can understand why he enjoyed building mathematical models. And why reviews of "Balance of the Planet" praised that. But assuming that was the point, I think missed the point.
I think it would be like creating Demons Souls, loving creating the back story, getting lots of praise for it, and deciding that the best thing is an interactive fiction game with nothing but unlimited detail back story. Then wondering some years later why you didn't change the world, no one has gone further than you did, and all games seem shallow compared to your imagination. Fortunately Miyazaki went a different way.
Not a surprise that Will Wright and Sid Meier (who I know is very much a fan of complexity theory) went in a more successful direction.