That's an excellent response, and I'd mostly agree with you. I'd only add two things; firstly, I got the impression at Scala Days and from mailing list discuss

That's an excellent response, and I'd mostly agree with you. I'd only add two things; firstly, I got the impression at Scala Days and from mailing list discussions that there was a little bit of a feeling that 2.8 was the last chance to fix some design choices that the designers didn't like. That Scala is big enough and well used enough now that they're not going to get away with the same behaviour for 2.9 or 3.0 and that there will be a lot more concern for compatibility in future. Whether it happens remains to be seen I suppose. Secondly (although you might disagree with this), there are no glaring problems with 2.7 so there's no need to rush to upgrade to 2.8, there shouldn't really be a problem with waiting 3-6 months for your dependent components to release (stable) 2.8 versions. I think that we're lucky that we don't depend on many external libraries so we'll be upgrading pretty soon, but it wouldn't be the end of the world if we had to wait a few months.