The lack of comparable properties in NLP formalisms is due to the fact, that so far there have been no projects that were solely concerned with the development of an industrial strength representation formalism.
Strong research is still required in computational models, doing a deep analysis of what the problems are and how they could be solved by available implementation techniques.
Research on grammar formalisms should put more emphasis on computational and software engineering aspects.
In regard to economic power, it should be remembered that programming language development is an economic sink, rather than a source: while multipurpose languages can use funding derived from multiple areas of research, each such area sees it as a minor subsidiary field. Direct funding for these areas is currently quite rare. This means that the situation for languages may not be so very different from that in NLP, unless a project is very lucky indeed.