I don't know that it's sad at all. If you want to make a language to be a research language, there's nothing wrong with doing so. If that's what you want, being influential, having other languages steal your ideas is what success looks like.

If you want your language to be used by working software engineers, that's a different metric of success. But then, you'd do things differently if that was your goal.

Haskell, in achieving some real-world use, has achieved beyond the wildest dreams of a research language.