Stealing angles for both qw// and literal subscripts solved those problems, but it meant that we needed something else to iterate iterators. And unary = is the best we've come up with so far, given all the other demands on the character set. It has some visual mnemonic value in that it looks kinda like two lines from a file. But yes, it's a little strange.

Reusing angle brackets was a great idea. I really like being able to write stuff like:

    my @array = < foo bar baz >; # instead of qw/ foo bar baz /

    %hash<foo>; # instead of %hash{'foo'}
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But I also agree that the unary = is a bit strange.

(On the other hand, qw// was a *very* strange idiom -- so I believe that, overall, Perl6 is a bit less strange beast.)