So, basically, you're panning the massive open collaborative effort behind SciPy/NumPy/Pandas because you can't be bothered to learn a slightly different and more flexible syntax? Because that's what it sounds like.
No it runs deeper than that. In my experience Matlab is used by people who are not programmers and don't aspire to be them. Ever. They want to easily prototype ideas and have zero interest in the machinery that makes it run.
Scipy/Numpy/Pandas are, at the moment, not the comprehensive, well documented and consistent platform that Matlab is. Simple things like a less than painless install process and numpy examples like "a*b" can be element wise multiplication or matrix multiplication pending if "a" is array or matrix are enough to put of my coworkers off for at least a year or two before contemplating a switch again.
Having the dct operate row-wise is not a different syntax, it's broken. The dct is a linear transformation and linear transformations operate on columns, not on rows. (Unless you apply them to the transpose of the matrix, which is what the SciPy dct is doing.)
