The relationship of Sage with existing open source projects was something I never quite understood. Instead of investing their knowledge and time into improving

The relationship of Sage with existing open source projects was something I never quite understood. Instead of investing their knowledge and time into improving the capabilities of existing systems (SciPy, NumPy or Maxima, Octave) to bring them up to par with the more pervasive commercial offerings (Matlab, Mathematica, Maple), they basically just bolted Python onto everything without in the end improving anything. Sage to me always seemed as just some kind of Python promotion vehicle trying to hide the fact that basically all the underlying systems it uses are written in other languages.