Lua fills its niche of no-fluff embeddable scripting language perfectly, the idea is to bind to your own code. It makes sense to me that they wouldn't focus heavily on the standard library. I think that if there is a large enough community of people who want to use Lua as a general purpose scripting language, they should maintain an unofficial stdlib.
Oh certainly and I'm not arguing against Lua's decisions to have a small stdlib. Just commenting on why it has seen low adoption outside of specific niches like scripting game engines, etc.
