Today I may have stumbled upon why the people working on scripting for Plasma tend not to grok at first the point and purpose of ScriptEngines or any of the other mechanisms we have put in place for this:

In most cases, the API is defined by the host and the language binding is just a mapping of that API into the runtime environment the code will be run in.

With Plasma it's really the other way around. The language support (not necessarily bindings!) define the API while libplasma simply provides the canvas and management of the components. The language support defines the API, which could be a 1:1 mapping to the libplasma API but really doesn't need to be.

So the language people have been looking at Plasma asking, "So... how do I bind to this API?" and see ScriptEngine which is totally unsuited for that and scratching their head. Meanwhile, I get to explain for the Nth time (where N == number of languages people are working on ;), probably rather clumsily, that binding isn't the point of those classes. =)

Now that I finally understand this difference in perspective, perhaps I'll be able to articulate it more accurately in future.