> extreme difficulty installing
Today's Octave installs do not need more than click-click-ok-done or apt-get install octave.
> for which the open source clone Octave is a bad joke
I think you're not giving Octave enough credit, considering that they have only a few part-time developers, and that nobody does sponsor them, they have accomplished a respectable amount of functionality over the last 20 years, it is extermely unfair calling them a "bad joke".
Of course with those limited resources they are not able to match the output of Mathworks, but what they can do as of yet is usually more than universities teach, and _still_ many departments are kind of married to Matlab, only mention Matlab to students, give only matlab examples, matlab labs, matlab exercises, etc. Also very respectable people like Gilbert Strang, who gave the MIT basic Linear Algebra and Computational Science and Engineering classes, seem to have enough vested interests in Mathworks to not even mention Octave to students briefly as something they can download and work at home. Octave is extremely powerful and capable for what you pay for it, and deserves at least a mention.
It is probably not different at other universities and other departments. Several professors I had to deal with were similar, either not even aware that open source packages like Octave, Scilab, Maxima, Scipy exist at all, or extremely faithfully married to companies behind proprietary packages like Matlab/Maple/Mathematica.