I mean, why isn't it possible to design a language that is both quite fit for education & production? Is Python vs. Pyret really that big a difference in education outcomes?

This is important for professors & TA's, educators, or enthusiast parents who wish to teach their children. All have to master a toolset and environment prior to teaching others, and maintaining the environment is also an ongoing cost. Some of this cost will be assuredly transferred to students, so we want to be sure that a "pedagogical" language without production traction has such powerful gains that it offsets the losses.

- has library support for the usual stuff: strings, math, web, database, encoding, etc.

- written using a lower level language (like C, Rust, C++), self hosted (Go) or a mix of those (Dlang, Perl6)

- is actually used to build applications, has some sort of community around it (Rust, Perl, Python, Lua etc.) or some backing (Swift, Java, Go)