To be fair, this was also true when I was using Matlab back before switching to Python (2006ish!), except you had to dig through documentation instead of just having everything immediately available on SO. :)
and back in 2010 or so, python's numerical optimization libraries left a lot to be desired, and totally hopeless compared to matlab. (edit, i don't remember it being nearly as good as octave, which wasn't particularly good either back then).