To be honest, I think that "not getting the love it deserves from MS" is the best thing that happened to F# :-). They did really good job at supporting the community - by open-sourcing F# and now also accepting contributions to the official MS release.

But the fact that they did not keep full control of F# means that the community had time to setup "The F# Software Foundation" (http://fsharp.org) and develop a really healthy open-source ecosystem around F#.

If you look at the data-science story around F#, there are libraries like F# Data, Deedle, R Type Provider, etc. I'm biased, because I contributed to most of them, but I think that community did much better job than Microsoft would in this area. So "not getting the love" is more like "getting freedom". And I think it really helped F# in many ways.

Do not get me wrong - MS is an important contributor and everyone in the community acknowledges that. But they are just a part of the F# story (there is excellent Xamarin support, great open-source projects etc.)