[amscanne]

Your estimate (> 90) for the number of people working on the core language is way off: https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors

Re: SML types, I think you may be confounding simplicity and terseness. The last time I touched ML was decades ago, so I don’t have a specific opinion here but consider “both more simple and more powerful” could be a contradiction. The lack of power and expressiveness can in fact be part of what makes things simpler, not strictly because of the language but because programmers are forced to do things in a “dumber” way.