Matlab is oversold as a general-purpose language

What makes you think it would be any better had they not used MATLAB?

I actually like MATLAB. It really excels when used as a glorified calculator and you can plug lots of things into it and have it 'just work' without much fuss. When I worked in a tutoring lab sometimes it was cool to have around because I could quickly whip up something interesting and visualize the whole thing to explain concepts. When I worked in the research lab (after I completely trashed the old application and started my own) I could hook up the computer to some cool hardware, run the experiment and do the statistical analysis all in one place. At my job now, people who aren't good at programming can use a computer to solve very hard problems.

I don't know why it's getting so much hate. I agree that it's not a good tool for every problem and that in the scientific community (and especially the psychology community) it is overused. But I don't really see why switching to another language would make things better.

2) Many Matlab users don't write any code but scientific code. They couldn't care less about how flexible python (or other language) is, when they already use and know Matlab.

3) Matlab doesn't make money from colleges or grad schools, they make money from industry customers. Of course the engineers and scientists of those deep pockets get trained at colleges and grad schools.

4) If you can write python, c++, or javascript, and if you keep publishing scientific code in that language even when Matlab is better suited, then it is possible that others will come with you. I am rooting for you. Just so you know, depending on the field, if you published your code in Matlab or R or whatever is the most popular for the field, you'd probably get more citations. Since academia is rounding error in Matlab's income, you will only be hurting yourself, if you chose not to use Matlab in a problem that it is best suited for.

5) Projects fail for many reasons. But, in your case, could the common denominator be the university rather than Matlab? In universities, it is hard (and I'd say unethical) to keep students for very long, so a research group may end up with a lot of code without owners if they are not careful. Good labs manage their projects, codebase, and hand-offs better.

Probably the most general cross-disciplinary reason MATLAB worsens an already bad situation is that it isolates scientists and engineers from people who are good at programming. When you seek out help for a particular problem, it's often a blind-leading-the-blind situation. How can you learn to program well if you've never seen a good piece of MATLAB code? Good luck finding good examples and role models to learn from if your programming universe is limited to MATLAB. Poor quality and practices proliferate because there is almost never anyone skilled reviewing changes and helping you get better. People just make a change and pray it still works.