To be honest, I think that "not getting the love it deserves from MS" is the best thing that happened to F# :-). They did really good job at supporting the community - by open-sourcing F# and now also accepting contributions to the official MS release.
But the fact that they did not keep full control of F# means that the community had time to setup "The F# Software Foundation" (http://fsharp.org) and develop a really healthy open-source ecosystem around F#.
If you look at the data-science story around F#, there are libraries like F# Data, Deedle, R Type Provider, etc. I'm biased, because I contributed to most of them, but I think that community did much better job than Microsoft would in this area. So "not getting the love" is more like "getting freedom". And I think it really helped F# in many ways.
Do not get me wrong - MS is an important contributor and everyone in the community acknowledges that. But they are just a part of the F# story (there is excellent Xamarin support, great open-source projects etc.)
For the language, maybe so; but MS are building great tools for C#/VB and it's senseless for the community to reimplement them for the "other" .NET language :(
The refactor/codefix support in Roslyn/VS is great; but I wouldn't even know where to start doing something similar in F#? Can I reuse the functionality? Or is the editor so disconnected that I'd need to implement all the menu etc. myself too? (This would make it inconsistent and not play nice with submissions else's CodeFixes that might draw menus).
But the fact that they did not keep full control of F# means that the community had time to setup "The F# Software Foundation" (http://fsharp.org) and develop a really healthy open-source ecosystem around F#.
If you look at the data-science story around F#, there are libraries like F# Data, Deedle, R Type Provider, etc. I'm biased, because I contributed to most of them, but I think that community did much better job than Microsoft would in this area. So "not getting the love" is more like "getting freedom". And I think it really helped F# in many ways.
Do not get me wrong - MS is an important contributor and everyone in the community acknowledges that. But they are just a part of the F# story (there is excellent Xamarin support, great open-source projects etc.)