After 9 days, no reaction from Wolfram developers ?! Why I am not surprised...
I am really not sure if WR already knows who is the Mathematica main user group, which is using Mathematica for serious symbolic (!!!) computations trying to solve huge and challenging problems. Because only this user group is able to point out on serious performance issues with basic symbolic functionality.
From my point of view, the WR is now focused mainly on non-important "whistles and bells" improvements (GUI, AI and other irrelevant functionalities), without any significant impact on the core symbolic functionalities and its performance.
Current typical Mathematica use case scenario in HEP and other theoretical physics research use the Mathematica only as the comfortable pre-post processor for external specialized symbolic solvers (like FORM, ...). This is definitely not a way expected from Mathematica by theoretical physicists.
Any significant performance improvement on core level symbolic functionalities would have definitely great positive impact on all use case scenarios in general, even on high school and undergrad math education.
Current common status of Mathematica in the theoretical physics research community is as follows:
- very nice GUI + Documentation
- a lot of functionalities, covering nearly all domains of mathematics... but effective often only on the trivial introductory level (toy problems)
- in a case of more complex (size, dimension, generality) problems, the usefulness of Mathematica terribly fast decreasing up to totally unusable tool
- nobody (!!!) at theoretical physics community is really officially sure if Mathematica is worth for the money ... This is the main reason why only Universities buy global licenses. Separate small research groups do not buy Mathematica and use other more specialized but far more effective (open-source) tools and Mathematica play only sometimes a role of tool-in-between
