The conflict I see is between pg releasing Arc at this very early stage because he found it useable vs you all going batsh*t over the volatility. You are both right! It is great that the users are chomping at the bit for something stable, but pg warned everyone that this was an experimental release and he planned to trash all our code at will. :)
Looking at Arc as a Lisp veteran I can assure you all that you totally need to reset your expectations and sign up for a fun exploration of a possible (emphasis on possible, because the more I learn of Lisp-1 the more I consider it a grave error) ... of a possible sweet spot in the abstract Lisp language space.
If Lisp-1 does turn out to be a grave error, it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to either add the Scheme features that make Lisp-1 work, or turn it into a Lisp-2, given the side of the Arc codebase.
Right now, I'm just looking for the best Lisp to develop web applications with. Ruby on Rails is my benchmark, and I think it can be improved on with Lisp, but that remains conjecture at this point.
Just to be clear. I'm not asking for stability at this point. I agree that maintaining backward compatibility would waste time & effort. Arc can still evolve like crazy and break existing code, but it would be nice to have a way for the community to feed patches & bug fixes to pg besides the Arc forum.