Yea, I'm not really sure what a new language buys them here. It seems they could have just released a library (not even tied to Matlab) with their highly tuned stiffness matrix assembly routines and their kernels...
If you only want the existing kernels, this makes sense. And in the long term it would be useful to have a library of common kernels for assembling FEM stiffness and mass matrices for various kinds of commonly-used elements, etc.
Compare to GSLS; the shading language is unnecessary if you only want to use a handful of pre-made shaders, but usually that is not case.
Compare to GSLS; the shading language is unnecessary if you only want to use a handful of pre-made shaders, but usually that is not case.