[hyp0]

I would guess the idea was to enable non-coders (esp. artists, level designers etc) to handle many of their needs themselves - for faster iteration.

But maybe the UnrealScript wasn't simple enough in practice to do that?

Or perhaps, giving people a template function, and a few functions, is just as easy/hard as a separate scripting language.

Generally, scripting languages are a really great idea: consider all the bash scripts in unix. An imperfect mismatch with the underlying language, yes; but worth it.

[GeneralMayhem]

It sounds like the problem was that UnrealScript was initially too simple for the applications it was pushed to, which led to more and more of the underlying system being exposed through the interop API.