[h3half]

Even then... the reason we use the aero toolbox is because everybody in the aero industry trusts that MATLAB's results are accurate. I don't need to prove that the ECEF<->Keplerian conversions are correct, I can just show that I'm using the toolbox function and people assume it's correct. The aero toolbox is trusted.

When I've had to write similar code in Python, it's a massive pain to "prove" that my conversation code is correct. Often I've resorted to using MATLAB's trusted functions to generate "truth" data and then feeding that to Python to verify it gets the same results.

Obviously this is more work than just using the premade stuff that comes with the toolbox.

Any MATLAB alternative faces the same trust issue. Until it reaches enough mindshare that people assume that it's too popular to have incorrect math (which might not be a good assumption but it is one that people make about MATLAB) then it doesn't actually mimic the main benefit of MATLAB which is that I don't need to check its work.