OK, another point. There is a virtue in having a standard that is backwards compatible with the base Arc release.
For example, I recently borrowed classifier.arc from anarki and ran it with the base release of arc with no troubles. If people start using the ! standard, then to use anarki libs one would have to run all of anarki. Which may be OK, it just has to be accepted that this is the case.
(As a matter of style I like ! too)
(somewhat related tangent:
[One of the best of these is a Gosperism. Once, when we were at a Chinese restaurant, Bill Gosper wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" -- GLS]
We're already not backwards compatible. Things like ssyntax.arc, for an extreme example, but also our additions of functions to places like arc.arc, e.g.butlast. That doesn't exist in arc2.tar, but we have it anyway. Anything that uses such functions requires Anarki. This is more extreme (you wouldn't be able to copy just those functions over), but not unique.