[stubish]

Package management is being worked on as part of the hopefully-to-become official 'dep' tool, which will prefer semantically versioned releases over pulling trunk. Things might be good here in 12-18 months. Its been acknowledged as a problem by the language developers.

Error handling is still exactly where you remember. Most of your code is still 'if err := p.something(); err != nil { return fmt.Errorf("I need to annotate the error so I know where this happened: %v", err) }'

Yes, you still tend to get regurgitated and poorly applied rationalizations if you bring up limitations. However, the language designers have been soliciting use cases and requests for improvements for Go 2.0 via their wiki. It does involve educating and convincing the community, which is a hard road and likely only to get submissions from the echo chamber, so I'm not holding out much hope beyond something like generics; it would be a losing battle to pitch error handling changes to true believers. Time will tell if this is a good approach or not, as opposed to messier changes like you see in something like Python.