I disagree with your assertion. TM 1.x was an amazing piece of software and way better than numerous text editors out there at the time.
Usability wise it was impressive, keyboard shortcuts made sense, creating your own snippets and extensions was a breeze, block mode was simpler than on any other text editor out there and there was support for most programming languages out of the box.
Consider for a moment that Gedit and Notepad++ are used professionally even today by many devs.
While I'm a big fan of Vim today and wouldn't go back I think TM 1 was a step up for me as it was for numerous other developers at the time. I went from using Gedit to Textmate and I was blown away by the feature set.