It's maybe also speaking past what Racket really is?
It's first and foremost an academic project. It's not really the job of the core team - mostly academics - to implement a all those utilitarian bits on top of the language. Their job is to work on ideas in the design of the language itself.
Ideally, then, that work enables whatever wider community of non-academics it can attract to build web frameworks and database bindings and whatnot.
That said, I do get the impression that Racket hasn't done anywhere near as good a job of carrying things through to that second step as comparable communities such as Haskell and Pharo have. The rumor mill would seem to suggest that the project's leadership engenders an ivory tower culture; and perhaps there's something to that? By contrast, even as someone who still hasn't finished learning Pharo and isn't really active in its community, I've still managed to have some direct (if small) interactions with Stéphane Ducasse, and that does, in some subtle way, leave me feeling more personally motivated to contribute to the project.
Matthew Flatt and most of the core team are readily available through slack or the mailing list and often answer themselves, even to newbies. Being a hobbyist myself, I think this ivory tower reputation is undeserved. Few people really understand racket under the hood because it's the product of the greatest minds in scheme. That makes the pool of 'experts' people can query very small, and I think it's honestly too much to ask from the core team to answer to everyone. Racket teaches humility and perseverance, which I find to be a very good thing.
It's first and foremost an academic project. It's not really the job of the core team - mostly academics - to implement a all those utilitarian bits on top of the language. Their job is to work on ideas in the design of the language itself.
Ideally, then, that work enables whatever wider community of non-academics it can attract to build web frameworks and database bindings and whatnot.
That said, I do get the impression that Racket hasn't done anywhere near as good a job of carrying things through to that second step as comparable communities such as Haskell and Pharo have. The rumor mill would seem to suggest that the project's leadership engenders an ivory tower culture; and perhaps there's something to that? By contrast, even as someone who still hasn't finished learning Pharo and isn't really active in its community, I've still managed to have some direct (if small) interactions with Stéphane Ducasse, and that does, in some subtle way, leave me feeling more personally motivated to contribute to the project.