It pains me to say, but like many still casually watching / not directly participating, I too feel like things are continuing to churn in the language a bit … beyond reason. Impl Trait, SIMD and slice patterns seem worthwhile (the latter two have been on the books forever). The other bits … I dunno, seem like many are cases of “it worked before”.
I know (and very much respect) that you’re making strong promises in terms of forever-supporting older editions, and “nobody has to use the new stuff”, but I still think there’s value to the great majority of people who will see code out of context without tracking editions in their heads, to keeping the inter-edition delta as small as possible, slowing velocity to changes that are really necessary, keeping the language as close to a single dialect as possible.
I’m not saying this to preserve some special shiny parts of the language I made / liked; much of that was either gone or set in stone by 1.0 anyways. I’m saying it because I want to preserve the exceptionally rare and beautiful success the Rust-you-all-built for 1.0 has experienced so far, and I think it’s hard to see clearly when your day job and/or passionate hobby is hacking on the compiler just how much unnecessary churn does pose a risk to its future. There’s already a ton in the language, and a ton for people to learn / train-on / document / get used to, and a ton of quality work to do on the implementation, integrations and libraries even if no more language features are ever added. Every unnecessary change puts strain on that.