Entire MATLAB toolchain is a ridiculously overpriced relic, the faster it disappears the better, and it will. To a close approximation the only folks who continue to use it are those who are insulated from the market -- national labs, and universities. It annoys me because at places its a ridiculous waste of tax payer's money.
No it's not. I've seen it used within petrochem and other engineering firms as well. For example, the real time simulator Opal-RT uses Simulink and Opals are used for things like simulating power systems.
Although you may not like it, it serves a purpose and it's one tool among many.
I actually work in power systems simulations and am not aware of anyone using the power systems toolbox in Matlab outside of some academic researchers. I'm sure some folks do, but it isn't very big. This is all mainly traditional Fortran and increasingly C++ and even C. There are some open source things like MatPower (Matlab or Python), but it is mostly seen as a neat toy and not something I would trust to actually run grid studies such as an EMS vendor, PSS/E, PowerWorld, Powergem, PSCAD...etc etc etc. I've actually seen that some vendors are looking at Julia to replace some of their tools.
When you say real time, you really mean an EMS system. These have traditional powerflow applications that use something like the Newton-Raphson method, SCADA applications that bring in data from equipment in the field (~4 second data), state-estimator applications that combine traditional powerflow with weighting from the SCADA data, and a Contingency Analysis (does N-1 loss of equipment simulations). Those are the core apps and the US has several vendors ranging from Siemens, Alstom (now GE), GE, OSI...etc.
In power system planning people use PSS/E, PowerWorld, PowerGem TARA, and a variety of other loadflow tools for powerflow and N-1. They don't generally use much real time data and instead use models ranging from 1 year to 20 years in the future. There are also another dozen vendors here selling specialized products that do everything from Voltage Stability to Transient Stability to optimization of topology and fault analysis. The breadth is very wide. You might use multiple vendors with some degree of product overlap because you like vendor A's powerflow functionality and graphics, while vendor B has the best dynamics on the market.
I'll have to check out the links you've sent as I've never heard of these two products and I try to keep my ear to the ground, but it is a huge software market and I don't monitor Europe's market as well.
Edit:
Just checked out your opal-RT links and yes that is real time power systems software, just not the kinds of real time analysis I typically use and think of. This seems closer to PMUs (phasor measurement units) which instead of 4-second SCADA data use something to the tune of 60 samples a second (that's a lot of data).
