... the notion of a "free new" in this type of adjectival sort of syntax is what the typical object-oriented programmer expects.

I care less about cognates (false and otherwise) with other languages than I do the coherence and consistency of Perl 6. Why add a special form when it's possible to generalize and unify an entire class of syntax?

That Perl 6 has currently settled upon using the colon is still too ugly...

The designers of Smalltalk (and Objective C) might have been right, though.

... and is as fastidious and ridiculous as saying 'CGI'::->new() in Perl 5.

Speaking of false cognates!