I think I mostly like that element of NumPy’s design. 2D arrays are in general not matrices. Images, for example, do not have matrix multiplication semantics.

I guess when you have a software package named "Mathematica", mathematicians expect to be able to take their math and transliterate it easily. Making them specify the "Dot" function would irk them.

I don't know the motivation of the decision, but "ElementwiseProduct" is harder to type, and still has a lot of use cases.