I can't blame him. Cutting bloat in the language core is clearly a goal. Nothing should go into the official Arc release unless it has proven its value in real code (which is basically News.YC at the moment).
Sure, he has to keep the control over the things. The point is that a few bug fixes (the mkdir problem for example), simple conveniences (see arc.sh) and even trivial optimisations (arc< to name it) available in anarki are of interest even in the official release. I'm not talking about experimental stuff (infix numeric notation, vectors, standalone exe, maybe docstrings, experimental module systems, ...)
But I think the few fixes and conveniences should really be taken into consideration. I can't believe none of them are of interest.
They probably are of interest, but let's not forget he's running a company in his spare time, and 3 releases in about 3 weeks is a pretty good work rate.
Of course, as someone running Arc in Windows, I'd love it if a bit more stuff worked out of the box (e.g. the blog, which didn't work in Arc1 IIRC). That's why I'm probably going to switch to developing on Anarki and then testing it on vanilla Arc afterwards.
Note that I don't criticize Paul's attitude there. 3 releases in less than a month is much more than what I expected. He didn't release early, but at least he releases often :) I just meant a few things would deserve a little more consideration, at least in the next few weeks/months ?