Thanks for the detailed response. I understand that having to deal with this sort of situation instead of working on bringing the project closer to fruition must be very annoying from a core developer's perspective. Sorry for contributing my part to this being dragged out further.
To clarify, what has distraught me the most about this change is not even the change itself (although I do think that, however small or warranted on its own it may be, it may have long-term ramifications that need to be considered much more carefully), but the way the process seemed to diverge from the fairly open and inclusive discussion that seemed to regularly take place in the past. This change may well have been brewing somewhere for a while, but from the point of view of someone who is not in the "inner circle", what was perceivable of it essentially was the thread I linked above some 16 days ago (which was remarkably full of responses by apparent "insiders" that aimed to discourage people from discussing the topic at that point in time) and the thread announcing the RFC, in which even some of the most basic questions needed for a casual observer to understand the tradeoffs were unanswered when the proposal of the RFC was mainlined something like half a day later.
The end result is something that looks similar to what happened with GNOME 3 to someone who was in the opposing camp in both cases, where the "in-group" at some point decided that they had identified a development agenda of utmost importance to what has in fact been part of the central mission of the project all along, and increasingly came to send the message that they held disagreeing members of the "out-group" to be obsessive hecklers and people who should just get out already if they don't like it - although nothing says it has to end up like that, where this took the state of Linux desktop environments is easily observed nowadays.
When considering the overall lifecycle of a project, the number of remaining "difficult decisions" is a far more accurate metric of completion than code or concept. Frustratingly, it is pretty much bound to increase towards the full end of the scale of the latter when the development process is a highly public affair. People wouldn't argue this topic with such ferocity if it wasn't for their appreciation of your work so far and high expectations for this project; please don't let that go to waste by shortcutting the decision process when you have come this far.
To clarify, what has distraught me the most about this change is not even the change itself (although I do think that, however small or warranted on its own it may be, it may have long-term ramifications that need to be considered much more carefully), but the way the process seemed to diverge from the fairly open and inclusive discussion that seemed to regularly take place in the past. This change may well have been brewing somewhere for a while, but from the point of view of someone who is not in the "inner circle", what was perceivable of it essentially was the thread I linked above some 16 days ago (which was remarkably full of responses by apparent "insiders" that aimed to discourage people from discussing the topic at that point in time) and the thread announcing the RFC, in which even some of the most basic questions needed for a casual observer to understand the tradeoffs were unanswered when the proposal of the RFC was mainlined something like half a day later.
The end result is something that looks similar to what happened with GNOME 3 to someone who was in the opposing camp in both cases, where the "in-group" at some point decided that they had identified a development agenda of utmost importance to what has in fact been part of the central mission of the project all along, and increasingly came to send the message that they held disagreeing members of the "out-group" to be obsessive hecklers and people who should just get out already if they don't like it - although nothing says it has to end up like that, where this took the state of Linux desktop environments is easily observed nowadays.
When considering the overall lifecycle of a project, the number of remaining "difficult decisions" is a far more accurate metric of completion than code or concept. Frustratingly, it is pretty much bound to increase towards the full end of the scale of the latter when the development process is a highly public affair. People wouldn't argue this topic with such ferocity if it wasn't for their appreciation of your work so far and high expectations for this project; please don't let that go to waste by shortcutting the decision process when you have come this far.