Right. SIMD was something people tried doing before they could get enough transistors to give every node an instruction decoder. It's useful for a narrow class of problems where special purpose hardware or an FPGA isn't justified, but the problem is so regular that SIMD will work. This niche is not large enough to keep a company in business.
(There were a long series of strange architectures tried in that period. Transputers. Hypercubes. Dataflow machines. The Cell. All too hard to program and not general purpose enough.)
Despite surface similarities, the two projects are very differnt (speed vs energy efficiency, simd vs mimd, lisp(*) vs forth)
But to program them you must keep the same mindset, I think, and both are best seen as macro-FPGAs.