it's only better than other programs when you can't include assumptions about the domain.

Yes, and also when the domain-specific information doesn't exist. We don't yet precisely know how language works, for instance. If we did, we could code it, but we don't.

There's also the matter of having a large additive O(c) constant. That's not as big an issue as some people make it out to be (it can be remedied by clever choice of programming language - provided you know what programming language to use).