I think Elixir/Phoenix has to be the best stack currently for building applications with real-time features and that's all thanks to BEAM. Perhaps Go is another decent alternative but I definitely prefer BEAM's concurrency model.
>I think command line utilities are in a worse financial position than GUI utilities, because people are accustomed to paying for GUI apps, but aren’t accustomed to paying for things in the shell at all.
I think that's because command line tools are more appealing to technical people. For convenience sake and ease of use, most average computer users will use GUI tools or applications.