I'll chime in, I did my thesis in MATLAB (specifically ML for MRI): While matlab itself wasn't the most fun to work with, they honestly have built a fantastic s

I'll chime in, I did my thesis in MATLAB (specifically ML for MRI): While matlab itself wasn't the most fun to work with, they honestly have built a fantastic suite of tools. For example the Classifier App is amazing for brute forcing through a bunch of stuff. Even went through a couple of hackathons with it and got some SoTA results. I wouldn't ever go back to it, especially outside of academia. But it's not the worst thing out there.