It's not my language, so I can't really talk to those questions. I think it's fair to say that the Racket group has always been focused on teaching languages no

It's not my language, so I can't really talk to those questions. I think it's fair to say that the Racket group has always been focused on teaching languages not to exclude "production languages" but instead because it's of their personal interest and lets them focus on certain aspects of the language to exclusion of others. They don't need to build performant standard libraries---they need to cleanly introduce good programming concepts.