> The response was basically "we disagree" and I wandered away feeling confused that so many bright people couldn't see the problem here.
That's a rather disingenuous summary given that literally the very first response is Brad Fitzpatrick from the Go team agreeing with you, acknowledging that it's unfortunate, and admitting that it can't feasibly be changed yet due to the compatibility guarantees. And then shortly afterwards, he encourages you to bring this point up when Go 2 comes around.
Actually you seem to be pretty disingenuous by ignoring the rest of the posts and focusing just on the first one. The overall tone of the thread seemed to be pretty dismissive and I doubt if a solution was proposed for Go2 that it would gain any traction.
On the other hand, there's every reason to believe the "Go [a]Way" prohibition on certain language features will leave Go 2 insufficiently attractive vs Go 1 to overcome the switching costs, dragging out any migration period. See also: Python 3.
That's a rather disingenuous summary given that literally the very first response is Brad Fitzpatrick from the Go team agreeing with you, acknowledging that it's unfortunate, and admitting that it can't feasibly be changed yet due to the compatibility guarantees. And then shortly afterwards, he encourages you to bring this point up when Go 2 comes around.