[chromatic]

We've seen one partial implementation after another, for years on end.

That's the second most disappointing part. The Parrot developers had a strong push between two and three years ago to redesign the internals to be a better fit for Rakudo along these lines (better runcore, easier JITting, improvements to the core object model, representation polymorphism), but the reaction from the Rakudo developers was a mixture of "No, thank you!", "Not yet.", and "If you have to, but don't change any APIs or behavior that Rakudo counts on."

It's a shame this couldn't have all been done at the same time. The available volunteer knowledge and interest might have saved two or three years of Perl 6 floundering around in the netherworld of big promises and very modest realities.

The most disappointing part is realizing that this sets back the potential delivery date of a usable Perl 6 by at least another couple of years. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise by now though.