The problem is incentives. The work necessary to bring a code base like this into production level and maintain it: be realistic - this will not be done by grad student labor without significant supervision, regardless of language. This is many times the effort needed to show "it works" once.
There is currently no incentive model that I know of that can make this work at a university, or even national lab. In these contexts currently it's really hard to get funding for a single "real" programmer for a year, let along a proper effort for something like this. If it became a critical infrastructure project for a federal level agency, sure - but why would they support doing it in public?
