I'm glad I did my undergrad at UC Davis in the mid '00s that valued portability and well-defined behavior rather than proprietary or implementation-specific, non-portable assumptions. The lazy, rationalizing throwing out the baby with the bathwater folks are disappointments to engineering excellence.
It's very hard in most language to portably handle endian-ness -- almost by definition, if your code has an issue where endian-ness effects behavior, it's not-portable.
I tend to take another view point (while I understand yours) -- if it's not tested, it doesn't work. And nowadays it's really hard to test big-endian code. I don't have one, I find running different-endian software in QEMU really annoying and difficult.
