People want to be able to ground your work—which you are claiming is the “parallel future of computation”—in something familiar. Insulting them and telling them their concerns are irrelevant just isn’t going to work.
I would urge you to think about what a standard comparison versus Haskell would look like. Presumably it would be something that dealt with a large state space, but also top down computation (something you couldn’t easily do with matrices). Big examples might include simply taking a giant Haskell benchmark (given the setting of inets it seems like a natural fit) that is implemented in a fairly optimal way—-both algorithmically and also wrt performance—-and compare directly on large inputs.
Sorry to trash on you here, not trying to come across as insulting, but I agree that “reductions per second” is meaningless without a nuanced understanding of the potentially massive encoding blowup that compilation introduces.
We want to believe, but the claims here are big