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I agree wholeheartedly with this. In fact, if Mathematica were open source, I feel it may even encroach upon machine learning applications.

Since finishing up in university, I have sorely missed my free access to a fast and ergonomic symbolic equation solver. Sympy is an unsatisfactory substitute.

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For my cases, when during R&D (data science for weather/geo/agro) I rarely need to work with formulas in symbolic representation, Sympy works enough. Cases like combining 2 equations into 1, simplifying, defining numeric coefficients, and printing formulas in TeX representation.

Have you tried Maxima as a symbolic equation solver?

Sage/maxima/etc are significantly worse than mathematica at symbolic operations. Check out these benchmarks:

https://www.12000.org/my_notes/CAS_integration_tests/reports...

Or Sage (sagemath.org)?

Sage uses Maxima though. And a bunch of other things as well.

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