> if I had to ever write some code with extremely hairy destructuring I definitely might change my mind an use it in a limited section of code...
Which is the point of every library for every language, anyway. I'd be hard pressed trying to use a matrix library in an IRC bot.
Personally, I find pattern matching to be a powerful way of not having to fiddle with 'caris and what not. I just say "if the user puts this and that and this, then do it this way". I'd argue it removes some amount of bugs, too - I caught a bug in pg's 'varline function because I was trying to convert it to pattern-matching form. Mucking about with car/cdr and friends feels rather low-level to me; and if Arc is attempting to be the highest of high level languages, it certainly shouldn't force the user to think in terms of list nodes.