It's true that I can't provide evidence that scientific computing NEEDS operating overloading beyond my own anecdotal experience. However, I've also never seen any support that operator overloading muddies code, besides other people's anecdotal experience.
The simple example I always come back to is how hard it is to find the bug in the following code:
I'll also concede that I've seen some try abominations with oeprator overloading. Would people be willing to compromise with just allowing the overloading of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division?
I know that overloading << or || can lead to some confusing code, but offering the basic arithmetic operators would end 90% of the whining by the people who do scientific code and need this functionality.
The simple example I always come back to is how hard it is to find the bug in the following code:
versus finding the same bug operator overloaded version