Interesting question is why academia/research is treated differently from the OSS community. Think about all the money being funneled into research from government and non-government agencies and this is never considered penny pinching / charity. Why isn't there a similar channel for companies / government agencies to sponsor OSS projects?
Higher level languages are easy to debug provided the code base is Application code. The more you move closer to the system, the harder it is going to be to debug higher level languages - even java.
Essentially that mimics the whole software development philosophy too: Higher level languages for higher level programs.