I'm sorry, but as a regular Matlab user, I have to say that, no, Matlab does not have an "excellent jit compiler." It has a jit compiler which is really limited, and works for straight-line code with built-in functions.

For performance you virtually always need to write 'vectorized' code, which is often difficult and memory heavy.

The daily churn of handling input parsing, along with contorting code into vectorized form takes up an extraordinary amount of time when writing Matlab code.

Matlab is certainly not 'good enough' for me! It's just what I'm stuck with at work.