I don’t disagree and I’m not qualified to be a core dev so my opinions must be salted. I’m operating on osmotic knowledge. I feel like what you are describing is the backstory of Perl6 and while it has lately turned into something usable it was a “failure” for nearly two decades; I’m of the opinion it actually helped Perl5 considerably and has been a really interesting experiment even when it wasn’t usable. Anyway, I see the no breakage / conservative approach to be exactly what is going on, 5.###. Some breakage, divisive. A version bump to 7, confusing and disrupting; not fixing the Perl6 name issue but compounding it. New blood? …Maybe? Maybe new blood will see the past delays and the remaining divisiveness and say, “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.” Full breakage, invites another total rewrite, Perl6++.

The social and design issues—and therefore the social issues about agreements on design—are extremely difficult. From my chair, all paths other than the one P5 is already on are untenable. There might be someone who sees a way around it but that would require real leadership, not what I’m doing in response to same: armchair quarterbacking.