Slightler cleaner coding practices, but it's still slow, pretty unreliable and it didn't make cross platform compatibilty a breeze.
Not to be a nitpicker, but BlitzMax is not slow, far from it. Max2D is slow, yes, but that's a big difference from BMax being slow. For the most part, BlitzMax is as fast as C++ or C#, in other words, it's as fast as you're likely to care about. But Max2D is indeed slow. And not looking like getting any faster any time soon.