[nemothekid]

>Does anyone else feel like 1.5 was released prematurely before it was honestly ready to go out the door?

Nope. I would consider it the same as moving from 1.7 -> 1.8 and having things break/bugs occur. How many people in the Java ecosystem are still on 1.6 for whatever reason? It may have been fixed before release if more people tested the release candidate (but that never happens), and unfortunately for software "x.0" ends up being the "public beta".

I remember in 1.3.0 where I reported a bug (that also had to do with string/byte slice weirdness), that was fixed pretty quickly and landed in 1.3.1 (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/8325).