It is possible that the vast majority of AI researchers are flat-out incorrect and need to be shown a better direction by you.

It is also possible that your own fitness-for-purpose coefficients are tuned differently than the majority of the field and they've made a sensible choice for their situation.

I'd wager on the latter.

You can all raise your eyebrows and appeal to authority all you want. Doesn't change the fact that as soon as I want to write a tight (or not so tight) loop to do something that is not covered by all these (undoubtedly great) libraries running underneath, I am very probably out of luck and have to use another language.

Doesn't sound like a very creative teaching environment to me.

Not to mention that, depending on what you count as "AI research", the vast majority of it is pure garbage (come on, we all know this).