Like you, I haven't used either for serious work in many years but the last time I was doing serious work I found Python to be much faster. I discovered this by accident after porting one of my Matlab programs to Python and noticed an immediate 4x speed improvement. I worked with both for many more years afterward and in my experience Python was usually faster with a few exceptions.

That said, Matlab had great tech support and the sales rep was always super helpful. They were much nicer to work with than say National Instruments.