If we define "general purpose" as "equally mediocre in all domains", then what you say makes sense.
If we define "general purpose" as "works well in as many domains as possible", then I'd argue that the correct response to an easily-remedied weakness in an important domain should be to address that weakness.
As you imply, the challenge here is to decide which requests to grant and which to deny, but the mere fact that a request is "domain-specific" (ignoring, for the moment, the questionable idea that _linear algebra_ is domain-specific) should not be enough to rule it out.
(As an aside, scientific / numeric Python is, I believe, one of its two or three most important application areas, and perhaps the most important historical factor in its success: that community has been championing Python since the days when people were using Perl for the web, or for anything else. Notice, for example, that Travis mentions working on SciPy in 1999---and the original "Numeric" package was written in 1995.)
If we define "general purpose" as "works well in as many domains as possible", then I'd argue that the correct response to an easily-remedied weakness in an important domain should be to address that weakness.
As you imply, the challenge here is to decide which requests to grant and which to deny, but the mere fact that a request is "domain-specific" (ignoring, for the moment, the questionable idea that _linear algebra_ is domain-specific) should not be enough to rule it out.
(As an aside, scientific / numeric Python is, I believe, one of its two or three most important application areas, and perhaps the most important historical factor in its success: that community has been championing Python since the days when people were using Perl for the web, or for anything else. Notice, for example, that Travis mentions working on SciPy in 1999---and the original "Numeric" package was written in 1995.)