I'm quite saddened to hear that.
I will say that the lang team is trying for maximal transparency by spelling out our early-stage thoughts, floating proposals and discussions on this forum as we have them (well before the RFC) and so on. Of course, I can't deny that ideas coming from subteam members have a higher likelihood of happening; that's empirically and inevitably the case. But we are doing our best to not treat any of this as inevitable, to keep an open mind, and to listen to people's concerns. (It's also worth noting, of course, that the roadmap itself was set based on substantial research from the survey and elsewhere, and community feedback, so that certainly gets some weight.)
I do take issue with the characterization of "without ever considering entirely different approaches or simply not making those changes". I think that the match RFC was a substantially different approach than the original, and I feel like we had a fully engaged debate around the potential downsides. And again, for the work on modules, there have been tons of iterations taking quite different approaches:
- Early post by @withoutboats
- Meeting notes on the meaning of privacy
- 2017-06-05 perspective
- Intermediate step toward this strawman proposal
- Thoughts toward a new proposal (which I'm trying to write up)
- Documented examples
- Data around learning issues
And these are just for the cases where we've fully written down the thinking. A few weeks ago, a number of folks on the lang team and otherwise spent on the order of two full days iterating through designs and the problem space, face to face.
I'm not sure what else to add. I do get a sense of polarization (an us-vs-them mentality) which I find very worrying, and that's part of why I've been spending so much time talking on this meta-level. I realize it's not enough for me to just claim that the teams are trying their best to operate in good faith, but maybe it's best to focus the worries you've raised on specific cases, rather than a general trend? In particular: if you feel like an issue raised is being ignored -- meaning, not actively engaged with or pushed on -- please flag it to me. But note that deciding, after examing a downside, that it's not a deal-breaker is not the same as ignoring the issue.