Yes people can change that is true, and I don't think anyone goes into a CS or IT program thinking this will be the type of code they write. The skills really are to think differently about code, and functional programming. Two things that are not taught in American universities(Or companies for that matter). So I feel like if I were to choose K as the language for my project which I expect to hire others to work on, I would have to build a K community in my area just to have the talent to work on my project.
I'm not (yet) advocating we all program in K, but we start with the simpler problem of trying to talk about programming like scientists: To try to define things only in terms of what we can measure.
The speed at which code runs? The size that the binary is? The size of the source file? How long it takes to build software that runs correctly?
These are things we can measure, and while I suspect once we optimise programming languages for these things we will end up with something that looks like K, I do not think that it will be K because I have noticed that K is very bad at some things that I like to do.
