'Tried to it right notwithstanding what masses think' and commercial success are not exclusive. Two examples. Clojure's maintainers very carefully vet what goes into the core language. It has been a source of frustration for some contributors too. But the net result has been more positive than negative and the language has been successful (relative comparison with Haskell). Second example is Lua. There was a comment by its creator (I'm paraphrasing from memory) 'Lua grows by answering why, not by answering why not'. But it still has found (again, relatively more) success, despite being conservative about language feature-set.