"reputation about being unnecessary complicated and obscure to use with a lot of CS-terminology/pseudo-elitism gate keeping doesn't exactly help"

Probably more this than any technical reason. More about culture and installed view points.

I don't want to get into the objects/function wars, but do think pretty much every technical problem can be solved better with functions. BUT, it would take an entire industries to re-tool. So think it was more about inertia.

Inertia won.