The PLT team clearly cares passionately about creating and maintaining real, usable languages and tools. That is why Racket exists. Very few academic projects produce anything nearly as useful and professional.
I find your comparison to Shen somewhat ironic, because, as much as I admire Shen, I think the PLT team has produced something of far greater practicality, with substantially better tools and documentation. Research is also valuable, and it is sad that you do not appreciate its value. The papers produced by the PLT team are exceptional. Some are already landmarks, and some will undoubtedly fuel the way people think when designing the next generation of programming languages. The beauty of Racket is that you get the benefits of that research right now. If you don't care about those innovations, you have dozens of other mainstream programming languages to choose from. ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users