I'd like to hear more about your issue with the JIT and where do you find it a hindrance?
I've had a few benchmarks lately that performed better under JIT than AOT compilation, and while that isn't always the case, the JIT, especially on dotnet 10, performs very well.
Put another way, "100% pure .NET" was never a goal in the same way it was in the Java world, but I never saw this as holding it back any more than the reliance on native code holds back languages like Python, because both have very good integration stories.
My only complaint is the lack of cross-platform support for C++/CLI, as it was a very useful tool for integrating with libraries that lack a non-C++ API.
The performance in theory can be slightly better in some niches but my point is simply that it's a huge chunk of complexity for not much gain.
Yes, because when you think about it, why should they?
MS has showed many times how unreliable and even user-hostile they can be, so the community at large is very wary of their ecosystem in spite of real advancements.
I wouldn't qualify that with "even". Numerical stuff like that is one of Python's most well-developed niches, and Python's numerical ecosystem is the benchmark everything else needs to be compared against.
C# sweet spot is really web APIs (and all variants thereof), IMO.