The thing that appealed to me about Babel back when it was still called 6to5 was the fact the output was far easier to read. If you compare the output of Traceu

The thing that appealed to me about Babel back when it was still called 6to5 was the fact the output was far easier to read. If you compare the output of Traceur to Babel, the difference is night and day. Traceur isn't readable at all (at least not to me) which might not matter, but I think in some cases, Babel's output is closer to more traditional Javascript and more performant. Overall it is a much better transpiler than Traceur. Plus you're right, the author is a great guy and open to suggestions from the community, it definitely isn't a closed off effort.