I've given my heavy criticism of R3-Alpha's binding model, and it's hard to imagine that it used to be even worse. But it sounds like it was.
As demonstrated by my writeups like "Rebol and Scopes: Well, Why Not?"... I am looking under every rock for possible ways that a model of binding in Rebol could be chosen which might lack some elements of rigor but that can still be useful (or "interesting", for some definition of interesting). So I wanted to see if there might be anything to mine out of Joe's opinions.
I don't think there's anything particularly new to be covered in Joe's opinions that I haven't already summarized about the Lisp/Scheme point of view... that Rebol is sloppy and slow, and tries to let you do more weird eval operations when the whole culture has been trying to minimize the use of arbitrary eval at all:
Lisps, Kernel, Clojure: limits of "Code is Data and Data is Code"
But I do think there are interesting things to see if you're not going to be entrenched too deeply in your idea of what a homoiconic language needs to be. Of course I think most of the non-trivially interesting things in the medium are Ren-C-isms... but they owe their existence to having meditated on questions that arose from this weirder/looser direction of working with code.