I fully agree with everything you said. When developing an app or library, people usually spend a significant amount of time reading code, so Crystal being very easy to understand and digest is a massive bonus, while not compromising on speed.
However, the core Crystal dev team, or whoever is / should be responsible for it, has been horrendous at promoting the language. It’s almost like they don’t want people to know about it. This is also quite noticeable in this thread, where they didn’t chime in at all.
A few months ago, I started learning Odin as a new programming language, and there’s literal hours of podcasts, showcase videos, examples etc. by the creator of the language talking about it. Odin is younger than Crystal, yet there is virtually no promotional content of Crystal available on the internet.
The overall PR of the language ranges from non-existent to very bad. I made this post a while ago, talking about how the motto needs a more lucrative take, and people in general seemed to agree, yet it went nowhere.
Someone who might be interested in picking up crystal takes 2 looks at the content available online, be that projects, showcases or discussions, writes off the language as dead and nopes out. Unless someone who’s actually part of the development actively goes out and promotes it, the language is just going to slowly erode away, despite the myriad of benefits it could provide to all sorts of applications.
Maybe this is just me being frustrated about the entire situation because I absolutely love Crystal and want it to be more popular, but it genuinely feels like the creators of the language do not.