it is not prefixed except in a couple of "new terms" (like úrchúrsa, which should be "cúrsa úr" in normal Irish in my opinion, I wonder why they love prefixing stuff in the new words created by Cóiste na Téarmaíochta etc, maybe because in English you put the adjectives before?...).
People say "teach úr", "bainne úr", "geansaí úr" etc...

Nua isn't a loanword, it's Celtic (cf Old Irish núa, nóe, Scottish Gaelic nuadh, Welsh newydd...).
Sometimes "nua" is prefixed but in exceptional words only (Nua-Ghaeilge...), in "normal" speech you wouldn't prefix it.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

I have also wondered about this for a long time and I finally realized it is for the same reason that the chicken crossed the road.

I have wondered that too. It seems to be unneccessarily altering the natural course of the language and is quite damaging as soon there will be so many exceptions to putting the adjective after the noun that learners will begin to put it before more and more and the next thing is that it will become acceptable to do that and we will be told that it is the 'natural' evolution of the language.
That is a question worth asking the Coiste - Lughaidh - as you would be ever so slightly more eloquent and knowledgeable about such matters than I. Let us know what they say!

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Actually, the problem is that I don't always know who created such words. Now you see them in most Standard Irish texts, but how could one know who created them in the first place?... Is it the Coiste or some writer or those who wrote De Bhaldraithe and Ó Dónaill's, oe someone else...?

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

These seem to be the people who are currently responsible for the collection of, and presumably creation of, new terms.

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I mean, I wouldn't write an e-mail to the Coiste and ask them "why do you use úrchúrsa instead of cúrsa úr?" if it isn't them who created that word, I would be taken for a fool

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

http://www.focal.ie/About.aspx?Topic=committee.ga
Sorry, forgot the link above!

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Actually, I think the formation of compounds in this way goes way back in the language.

It is somewhat parallel to the use of h for lenition (séimhiú) instead of using a dot Originally, séimhiú was represented with an h. Then some scribes started abbreviating the ch's to ċ, etc., and the practice caught on, so that by the time printing came around, most people were writing dots instead of h's, but the h's are the older form.

However, when the revival came there was a desire to make the language more accessible in the least expensive way possible and so the practice of readopting the h's was seen as a way to use readily available typefaces and typewriters without having to modify them. Although when writing in old fonts, we tend to prefer the dots, in actual fact h's are even more traditional.

Likewise, forming compounds instead of using the genitive might seem "unnatural" to modern sensibilities, but it isn't Béarlachas - it's actually more traditional and goes way back before English even existed.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

yeah, 1500 years ago people would prefix more adjectives than now... but the language has changed a lot since then



Here we weren't talking about the genitive, but about prefixed adjectives, instead of putting them after the noun.
Anyway, it's as simple as this: why do they prefix stuff while nobody has done it for say more than 1000 years? It's as if you were re-introducing declensions in English

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

That would be a rather simplistic interpretation indeed.

In both French and English, we go back further than that to make compound words from Latin and Greek that make very handy compounds for modern concepts where stringing together French or English words would make for unwieldy phrases instead of concise single words.

You can try to make it sound as ridiculous as you like but it is a useful tool.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).