It doesn't matter what you or I think, it matters what other people think, and yes, compatibility with their existing infrastructure is something that is highly desirable.
From my other comment:
The people here are not really painting a good picture of BEAM vm languages. The typical complaint is some extremely energetic new hire wants to use Erlang for something, does, and then it turns into a hard to maintain mess. You can equivocate about the specific reasons but if you are really going to say ignoring legacy compatibility is stupid then I'm not sure what to tell you.