That doesn't have anything to do with the question of whether "raw number of successful projects using it" is a good metric for how good something is. Lots of s

That doesn't have anything to do with the question of whether "raw number of successful projects using it" is a good metric for how good something is. Lots of successful companies have made mistakes, and there are even mistakes that many companies in a field made simultaneously (e.g. the XML mania of the early 2000s is not fondly looked back on). I'm not commenting on the specific issue of whether Python creates good trade-offs, just that I think tallying successful companies is a poor measure of a programming language.