I generally like Fender basses and amps, but sometimes they do goofy things, especially when it comes to amps. Maybe if this amp appeared 5 to 10 years before the SVT, it might have seemed like a good idea. But by 1969, you had the SVT, Acoustic 360, Marshall, and Sunn amps. Stages were getting bigger, music was getting louder, and bassists needed to be heard. It almost seems like Fender came up with a good concept, then stacked the deck against it so that it couldn't succeed like the aforementioned amps.
I think it's similar to the Studio bass. They built a nice 200W tube amp into a very large, thin, and top heavy combo. Now, if was never meant to leave home and /or your studio, it wouldn't be a big deal. But Fender's advertisements at the time said you could take this amp to stage or studio, so you could always get your sound no matter where you were playing. I haven't even seen a Studio bass amp in over 30 years, but I remember it being a big, HEAVY amp to move. I notice a lot of people who get them build them into a head format, to make it easier to move. Couldn't Fender have at least offered a head and speaker option when it was new? I think they could have really made a mark at that time with that amp if they did that.