[groovy2shoes]

The problem is that there's a baseline minimum of features that need to be standardized to have enough interoperability between implementations for a package manager to actually work, and that minimum is still too big for many die-hard Schemers. Call them "50-page-purists", if you will, but they want the standard to be as small as it can possibly be. They argue that inessential features are better left to the programmer -- the problem is that in reality, those features get implemented by the implementor, often in a different way than another implementor did it. So we wind up with a mess where everybody is R5RS-conformant, but nobody has a modules system compatible with anyone else's.

The R6RS editors tried to remedy this, but wound up causing a schism in the Scheme community which was pretty damaging. The "50-page-purists" have somehow gotten into their heads that the R5RS is the be-all, end-all of Scheme, and that any additions whatsoever are features piled on top of features. Now, with the R7RS, we've not re-united the Scheme community, we've fractured it yet again. There are now three factions (in no particular order): (1) those who think the R7RS sucks because of gratuitous incompatibilities with R6RS; (2) those who think the R7RS sucks because it's got more features than the R5RS; (3) those who like the R7RS.

Personally, I find that a module system and user-defined records are extremely welcome, and a long-time-coming, really, but I fear that the R7RS-small on its own is still too small for something like Snow2 to really take off in an implementation-independent way.

In short, I agree with you. But, it's complicated.