bioinformaticians have been making these useless bioinformatic-toolkit-in-my-favorite-programming-language repos for years

Well, what else are we going to do while waiting for the bench scientists to finish collecting data?

Dissertationware is common in a lot of fields, honestly.

Hate to agree, but it is true. For a while, I think, the main sequencing framework was in perl (Bioperl). Not sure what was best for structures - possibly Biojava?

It is very tempting, though - 'just' make a nice, clean API in your favourite language (eg Haskell, Ruby, ...) and everyone will flock to use it! Maybe.