I really think you are striking a tone which is quite unhelpful, and which does not advance your argument. (You also had one about ‘the party line’ which you removed.) Your general tone and attitude is antagonizing and make some (me at least) more likely to dismiss your points, even if you have any useful suggestions.
As for this:
The great thing is explicit broadcasting. I am very used to implicit broadcasting from Matlab, and it causes lots of annoyances when you start putting different functions together, particularly because Matlab is inconsistent with whether it prefers row- or column-vectors as default.
My Matlab codes are always full of if isvector(x), foo(x(:)'); elseif ismatrix(x) ..., and then this compounds when i have several layers of this going on, and maybe I switch between row- and column preference.
If you haven’t already, please read More Dots: Syntactic Loop Fusion in Julia (though I see it was already posted by the author.) Explicit, syntactic broadcasting is a very user-friendly feature which makes it much easier to vectorize code. It is in my opinion a dramatic improvement in user-friendliness over Matlab and Python.
Also, you cannot just ‘assume it is the norm’. You would actually have to implement broadcasting for all of the functions you wanted it in if we didn’t have the current way of doing it.