I view Racket as an academic language used as a vehicle for education and for research. I think Racket does fine in its niche, but Racket has a lot of compelling competitors, especially for researchers and professional software engineers. Those who want a smaller Scheme can choose between plenty of implementations, and those who want a larger language can choose Common Lisp. For those who don't mind syntax different from S-expressions, there's Haskell and OCaml. Those who want access to the Java or .NET ecosystems could use Scala, Clojure, or F#.

There's nothing wrong with an academic/research language like Racket, Oberon, and Standard ML.

I wish Standard ML had a strong ecosystem and things like a good dependency manager/package manager. I really liked it. But there is even less of an ecosystem around it than some other niche languages, and I've gone into the rabbit hole of writing everything myself too often, to know that at some point I will either hit the limit of my energy burning out, or the limits of my mathematical understanding to implement something. For example how to make a normal distribution from only having uniform distribution in the standard library. So many approaches to have an approximation, but to really understand them, you need to understand a lot of math.

Anyway, I like the language. Felt great writing a few Advent of Code puzzles in SMLNJ.

Racket is my first choice for most code I write these days and I've published a fair number of libraries into the raco package manager ecosystem in hopes other people using Racket might find them useful too.