You may be right about "free": with the low cost of the home edition the barrier to acceptance is already very low indeed.

At the end, you touch an increasingly important problem in epistemology. Focusing our efforts in increasingly specialized fields enables us to get to the coal face in reasonable time (say, over the course of a doctorate). But, it is becoming apparent that there are disbenefits - the span of human knowledge is so vast that it is hard to transfer learning from one field of discipline to another, or to integrate knowledge across different fields. And yet there can be enormous potential in the cross-fertilization of disciplines (e.g. from physics to finance, to produce financial engineering). This epistemological problem is growing more acute and increasingly difficult to solve; but I believe a solution lies in the field of AI, where, in principal, machines will have access to knowledge across a wide range of specialized fields and the processing power to be able to integrate them, where appropriate. Amongst other things this will require, or lead to, the ability of machines to program themselves (meta-programming).

Cue WolframLanguageData, new in version 11: WolframLanguageData[entity,property] gives the value of the specified property for the Wolfram Language symbol entity.

Which, coupled with machine learning capabilities, opens up the possibilities for meta-programming in WL.