Pike's developed a language designed to be easy "to understand and easy to adopt."

"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical." – Rob Pike

They are not researchers, they are engineers.

Do I think Pike could develop a language for researches filled with special unicode characters that do magic things? Of course.

But this practical approach to a language doesn't make him a giant prick. As someone who has played with "Fancy" languages you get tired of them (and the people using them) after a while.