I think it takes a lot of guts to come to the conclusion, and publicly admit, that the attention of the team needs to better reflect the community's needs. From personal experience I know it wasn't easy.
This does leave me a little concerned. As a third-party MediaWiki user, a friendly talk page interface was something I was looking forward too. The people I support are non-technical and work like VisualEditor have greatly impacted the contributions from folks. Flow appeared/appears to follow in the same vein.
How does this impact having a stable release of the Flow extension for third-party users? It's still very much a beta release (multiple extensions pseudo-required as an example) and is labeled as such on Mediawiki.org.
This leaves us with unclear options when it comes to enabling a better Talk: interface from the default wikitext-heavy experience of MediaWiki.
Will Flow reach a 'stable' state for third-party users? One that you would recommend for use?
Yours, Chris Koerner clkoerner.com
P.S. Might I suggest posting this message on the Extension:Flow talk page as well? Third-party MediaWiki users should know what they're getting into if they decide to adopt Flow.