Reasonable people see the problems and know that they're there. Comments like yours seem to want to pretend that they don't exist.

No,no,no. I recognize that there are problems and, in fact, I expected there to be problems. I guess I don't see why other people didn't expect the same. Though I've never really participated in large projects to the extent of a Dan or a Larry, I've watched enough of them to realize that certain problems are inevitable. And the odds of some non-problems becoming problems increase with time.

WRT, "Can't you just...", I actually haven't heard anyone say that either, but many times when discussing perl6 with people that's the impression I get. Their complaints seem to say "can't you just tweak perl5 a little bit to get perl6?" (Perhaps that's a "marketing issue" though. People seem to expect the innards of version N of a product to not change substantially from version N-1; just that new features are added. With perl6, everything changes but the spirit of perl)

If we're still designing Perl 6, we're in pretty bad shape.

Why do you say this? Do you think that 6 years is an unreasonable amount of time to still be designing something when the designers are volunteers and do any designing "in their spare time"?

Without Pugs, I think there would be no hope.

I agree with the sentiment but I don't think I agree with the actual statement. The Perl6 community needed someone to throw another log on the fire to keep it burning. It just so happens that log was pugs, but what's of paramount importance IMHO isn't so much pugs as is people like audrey participating in perl6. "Without audrey, there would be no hope" :-) Without people willing to push through the problems in design and implementation (including social problems), there would be no hope. (but that should go without saying)