Hmm, well, don't be too put off by what happens on the mailing lists; we all like to do our share of bikeshed painting, but a lot of that is just noise. Most of the recent design decisions have actually been simplifications to make implementation easier.

Hehe, to quote someone you may know:

Me too. If it's any comfort, just think of the design of Perl 6 as a genetic algorithm running on a set of distributed wetware CPUs. We'll just keep mutating our ideas till they prove themselves adaptive.

This being Perl, we will not tell people that they're using a thread continuation monad, because that would be scary.

To quote again (someone else):

And continuations. But continuations are scary. Good scary, but still scary.

Perl is all about letting people think they know what's going on until they really need to know what's going on.

I love that. It seems (appropriately) applicable to the confusion in the community over how close Perl 6 is to being done, too.

Frankly, I'm a fan of the "it's done when it's done" approach -- it tends to lead to better software when all is said and done, assuming you have enthusiastic people working on it, in my experience. I'm also impatient to have a stable Perl 6 to play with, though. For one thing, that's when the good tutorial documentation will start to appear, and I'd really like to start reading the stuff.