Yes, you are correct that bug fix release cycle and feature release cycle are different. If I felt that the majority of criticisms and comments were about bugs, I wouldn't have felt compelled to respond in this way. Perhaps I've misjudged that.

I will admit that the bug list is extremely disheartening. I have personally never come across them in the wild, but I don't doubt that when they do come up they are a horrible roadblock and the burgeoning set of community tools to work around this is telling.

There's also a difference between language features, and std library or browser API features.

I'm fine with Elm-the-language as it is, but I would definitely have preferred for a stdlib not to expose a function that are just a TODO.

I still use and enjoy the language, mostly because everything else in browserland is a pit of despair for me, but I could see some quality pull requests being merged once in a while.

There are probably people out there who think that a language should change more rapidly, but I think most people just take a quick glance at when the last release or commit was and judge that it's someone's hobby project that they've long abandoned.

Which is more or less true, given that Evan never let anyone else fully participate.

Yeah, I think that's exactly the attitude I want to push back on.