I'm exaggerating, of course, but countries that don't use Scratch mostly don't have the infrastructure to teach with Snap! either.
Actually I love when kids come to Snap! on their own initiative. They generally write more interesting projects, ask better questions, and are the superstars of our community. (Note that I said "generally"; there are kids who start using Snap! in school and get really interested and become superstars, and there are kids who come to Snap! on their own, but do "remix this project and add your name.")
But we're talking about popularity of educational programming languages, and the use of Scratch in schools gives them a huge advantage that we'll never match, even though we're used in some schools too.
Haha, we didn't choose them, they're the colors we inherited from Scratch 1.4. :~) But if it's eye-burning you're worried about, how can you like white backgrounds? That's what burns my eyes.
More seriously, that sort of thing isn't what prevents people from liking Snap!, not if it's advanced ideas they want. Imho we have no real competition among visual languages when it comes to ideas. Afaik nobody else (except of course for Snap! mods) has first class procedures, not even App Inventor, which is very respectable about presenting other big ideas. (In saying this, I'm not counting exact visual equivalents to text languages, such as Greenfoot.)
There's a chicken and egg problem about popularity. Because everyone knows about Scratch, they attract big donations from rich people, companies, and foundations. And therefore, they can afford a large team of full-time programmers, a large team of moderators, and all the storage and bandwidth in the world. In our world, otoh, even Jens isn't a full-time Snap! developer, because SAP wants him to spend a lot of his time writing curriculum, running workshops, and speaking at conferences. And Jens is still paying for storage out of pocket. So we're limited in what we can do. In particular, we have no public relations department. Adult CS professors know about us, because we speak at those conferences. We're doing okay at becoming known to secondary school teachers. But kids? I wouldn't know how to begin. We do better in Germany, because Jens and Jadga do know how to begin. They're on social media, for one thing. And, as I said, they are in part paid to put video on the web. And because other people, CS professors, write textbooks using Snap!.
I don't think this is a flame war; hardly any posts are ad hominem attacks, for example. I think there's been a lot of confusion about what people are intending to say, partly because there are crossing discussions on somewhat different topics, and partly because people aren't always so good at expressing themselves, because, you know, they're kids, and they're programming nerds. :~P
Yeah that's not exactly what we want to be popular for! I'm especially nervous about the occasional "I got banned from Scratch so I'm here now," because quite often when someone gets banned it's for a reason. But, that aside, we don't want to be a substitute for Scratch for whatever reason. We want to be your first choice!
Real-world programmers, no; not unless they have adolescent kids. But we're pretty well known among programming language researchers. :~)