"But after a certain very short prototyping period, I end up fighting Python’s terrible deployment, terrible efficiency, and slapdash language implementation when trying to build something robust."

How many programmers would see Python's language implementation as "slapdash" or care? The fact that you both see it that way and care speaks volumes towards you fitting my characterization of the kind of person who uses a minority language.

The other points likewise. Python's inefficiency is well-known and acceptable for most use cases. Where you need better, it lets you escape down to more efficient languages in libraries. Some good examples of this include pandas and various machine learning libraries.

And as for deployment, it is more of an organizational challenge than technical one. The strategy of taking half your servers offline, deploying, then swapping and repeating worked fine 20 years ago. It works fine today. (You might have to do some ceremony with kubernetes. But the strategy remains conceptually similar.) This is only a significant pain point when there are other problems that interfere.

The fact that these things bother you, and bother you enough to rewrite wheels that already exist, speaks volumes.

The fact that people who agree with you on this then can't agree on whether strong typing is worthwhile (like Haskell), or continuations are good (like Scheme) or whether performance is critical (like Common Lisp) or whether access to the JVM toolset matters (like Clojure) causes you to not create a critical mass around a better toolset. And so the situation remains. You all agree that the popular languages are so terrible that you avoid them. But then can't agree on which unpopular language everyone should use instead, or why.