The point wasn't a new front-end. From this Wired article[1]:
> But there is one thing about the wiki that he regrets. "I always felt bad that I owned all those pages," he says. The central idea of a wiki – whether it's driving Wikipedia or C2 – is that anyone can add or edit a page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls. Cunningham now believes that no one should have that sort of central control, so he has built something called the federated wiki.
So, in short, the point is decentralization, so the Wiki belongs to the people and not be under any one entity's control.
> But there is one thing about the wiki that he regrets. "I always felt bad that I owned all those pages," he says. The central idea of a wiki – whether it's driving Wikipedia or C2 – is that anyone can add or edit a page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls. Cunningham now believes that no one should have that sort of central control, so he has built something called the federated wiki.
So, in short, the point is decentralization, so the Wiki belongs to the people and not be under any one entity's control.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2012/07/wiki-inventor/