I am also new to this planet and therefore, pardon me if I don't know much of mathematica either, but these are a few first impressions.

Lol... Which solar system are you from? Does the code number start with an A?

Therefore commoditizing i.e. providing for free or making open source part of the low level routines (e.g. basic algebra) would go a long way to get the buy in from the youngsters.

You are not the only person to have had this thought, but have not seen discussions to the point of what means Minimal Working Kernel? Does it need a graphics front-end or ability to show pics? Not in my opinion. Runs from CMD? Yes. File read & write? Yes. Symbols and polynomials? Yes. Arbitrary BigInt? Yes. How many extra "conveniences" functions? 42? For certain proofs, matrix inverse needs to work with polynomial elements. How to translate this code to mathematica?