Re: I am scared of the pressure to add [...] features to address immediate needs and fashions
Correct. Additionally, the prejudices reign supreme.
Example - when you mention Perl you get retches all around. At the moment I am doing a piece of code which needs to deal with some low level packet mangling, database access and a northbound RPC interface in both Python and Perl.
1. Every single library in Perl worked out of the box and all of them were on the system, so no CPAN abuse. PCAP, Epoll, JSON, DBI and most importantly packet manipulation. Straight sailing all the way until it worked.
2. Python. My, oh, my. It takes some guru level hoop jumps to integrate pcap into anything useful with an event loop, half of the packet mangling does not work, DBI is non-existent and there is only a very loosely policed database interface. Most importantly the off-the shelf packet manipulation does not work so you are either facing the choice of reusing scapy which is a dinosaur or you have to write your own.
So the fact that the emperor has no clothes does not prevent the emperor's followers to continue shouting loudly. Fashion and fanboiing all around.
By the way, the system this will be integrating with is written in C++, but there is no way I am writing in this. Not that I cannot, life is too short for it considering that it has an API interface and python bindings.