my opinion really isn't the primary driver of language adoption

My interest is trying to encourage contribution not adoption. (I've always thought adoption will largely take care of itself and will reflect how robust the product is.)

People are avoiding Rakudo because P6 hasn't delivered anything useful and usable for general consumption in thirteen years.

By mid 2003 people were avoiding Mozilla because it hadn't produced anything useful and usable for general consumption despite spending many millions of dollars and 6 years on it. Because I knew what was going on behind the scenes, I chose to continue to contribute and try to attract more contributors in the face of ill-informed ridicule and attacks. The same applies to Perl 6.

sane socket support?

sri's issue is non-blocking sockets which depends on using the underlying VM's support for concurrency. As labster said less than a week ago, the current short term plan is "get the JVM working ... start getting threads flushed out ... then buffers, and sockets". As things stand right now the JVM is sufficiently working, some initial concurrency primitives including threads have been implemented (more have arrived since that commit), jnthn made a series of improvements to the Buf type just before leaving for a week vacation, and today, his first day since returning, he's begun making socket commits.

documentation that wasn't a pile of specification tests hyperlinked to synopses under constant churn

See Perl 6 documentation.

keeping a working ecosystem might let people get things done

People manage to get things done.

Module breakage is generally relative to git head, not Rakudo Star (the quarterly batteries included distribution which is what users wanting stability should use).

#perl6 is typically very responsive to any regressions brought to their attention by a user.

Head is developing rapidly. So there's often a lot of breakage against head. This has reached an all time peak in the last few weeks.