Racket's support for parallelism with futures and places is in my experience almost unusable. I don't understand why they have chosen these horrible abstraction

Racket's support for parallelism with futures and places is in my experience almost unusable. I don't understand why they have chosen these horrible abstractions rather than providing access to OS-level threads plus some reasonable synchronization mechanisms like channels, shared memory, or actors. Before you criticize me for this statement, please let me assure you that it's based on plenty of experience. I'm using Racket for almost all my programming since Racket 2 and have contributed libraries. My hope is that they add good parallelism support in Racket 7, and since it's based on Chez scheme all thread support should already be built in. Places suck.