I'm an electrical engineer oriented towards signal processing and controls, and I'm also incapable of understanding Matlab's niche and effectiveness. I wish Matlab could just vanish. It's a glorified calculator that has mutated over the years into a crap programming language, with random features just bolted on and the strangest semantics of all time.

It also has the drawback that most of its users generate write-only code, so everyone that learns it also learns to write code that way.

I second this. And to make matters worse, a lot of MATLAB users are not aware of coding style. Poorly readable MATLAB code stinks. I sometimes rather wish to read Fortran 90 instead of MATLAB code.