My grand takeaway from Aphyr's Jepsen series (http://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen) is that the more sophisticated software becomes in the never-ending quest for features and performance, the more likely the fundamentals underlying it have been overlooked, glossed over, or ignored completely.
As aroman said, "The real story here is that people are working on a number of new libraries/modules/tools for doing web development in CL".
But apgwoz's general point about how we evaluate software is spot on. In general, I think benchmarks and the like have a sort of "woo"ing effect on people (in the James Randi sense), and we should probably take a few moments to reflect on that before making any major architectural decisions. :)
Leo Meyerovich did a study on the social factors that affect language adoption[0]. Vivek Haldar has a highlights the salient points[1]. More info at his site: [2]
[0]: http://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/socioplt/papers/oopsla201...
[1]: http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/56972066006/empirical-analy...
Indeed. It's sad that as engineers (who theoretically espouse logic, reason, and evidence) we still end up making so many decisions based on herd behavior.
For my anecdotal experience, apart from JS libs (where style over substance is frequently the norm) I find a well-designed website is usually a sign the project cares about its users, and is more likely to provide good documentation & a space to ask questions.