Some of the community did use TADS, although AGT tended to be more popular for those moving on from the 8-bit tools.
But, yes, it very much seems like it was a parallel community, We were aware of “interactive fiction”… here are some extracts from an article in Adventure Probe from '97 that was looking at the third annual IF competition… You can tell that the author very much regarded “interactive fiction” as something that was becoming quite different to the “text adventures” that would appear in Probe. 
http://8bitag.com/temp/probe-if.jpg
http://8bitag.com/temp/probe-if-2.jpg
But we’re in danger of completely derailing Victor’s excellent thread. I’m just very happy to see people like Victor approaching the old games in such a positive manner.
[Edit: To credit John Ferris as the author of the article the extracts were taken from]