I think your conclusion can be amended to "the people who are willing to pay for more speed get the most value for money by creating or buying an application-sp

I think your conclusion can be amended to "the people who are willing to pay for more speed get the most value for money by creating or buying an application-specific solution rather than a generic one". Like your hedge fund example: why pay for accelerated R, when you can spend just a little more money on hiring a low-level C/assembly programmer instead and get 50x more speedup? It's not just startups, big companies suffer the exact same problem. Look at Portland Group's OpenACC initiative, for instance, which intends to make GPU acceleration as easy to use as OpenMP, with pragmas etc. But everyone interested in GPUs just go and run straight CUDA or OpenCL code instead, there are essentially no "casual GPU acceleration users". Also see Cray Chapel.