That includes people like Lars Bak, Martin Odersky, Anders Hejlsberg, Simon Peyton Jones, etc? I wonder where the burden of proof should be placed in these kind of arrogant arguments -- as if "compile-time metaprogramming" is some magic bullet for compiler design...
As for the rest - yes, compiler construction is not their main research topic. They can all be great language designers, but their approach to compiler construction is needlessly overcomplicated.
A view of a compiler as a chain of stupidly trivial passes, ideally expressed as term rewriting, is not very common among the researchers, but so far it yields the best results.
Actually Lars Bark and team are not "language designers". Smalltalk (Strongtalk), Java (Hotspot), Javascript (V8), all have been designed as languages by other people.
They are world reknowed experts in compiler design.
The only explanation for not using this approach is a plain ignorance. Majority of people have no understanding of compilers at all. And yet they are writing compilers. In C or Haskell.
And, btw., teams that cannot learn a tiny DSL in an hour (or write this DSL in a week) should not be allowed to write compilers. It's kinda obvious.