Not sure this is a popular opinion as presented by the author? I'd say the most sought-after PL features would be expressive type systems and those that reduce boilerplate. I've never heard someone long for a more "business oriented" programming language.
>It’s naïve to think that the language is responsible for the quality of code and that by adding some bells and whistles (or removing some bells and whistles), we can automatically make everything better […] I feel like the core issue here is in the domain of sociology and psychology, and not the programming.
I'd disagree, e.g. Rust's semantics rule out whole classes of common runtime errors. More expressive languages such as Kotlin, Scala, Swift, … are seeing rapid adoption over their more boilerplate heavy counterparts, such as Java or Obj-C. The desire for better languages is justified imho, as there's still a lot to gain. New PL development is not rooted in neurotic unhappiness, real progress is made.