You seem disappointed that the arrow notation is going away. Personally, I think this is a Good Thing. Aside from the fact that it will mean less typing for common things, it's a holdover from the old days of C. In C, a struct's members could be accessed with dot notation:

  typedef struct {
      double x
      double y;
  } POINT;

  POINT some_point;

  /* and later in the code */

  some_point.x = 1.02;
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However, if you later had passed a pointer to a struct, you would access the struct members with arrow notation:

Since Perl was largely designed to be familiar to C programmers, having an arrow to dereference things seemed fine. However, Perl 6 seemingly is intended to be familiar to a larger audience (in some ways), it makes sense to drop the C style arrow notation in favor of the dot notation that popular languages use.

And just to keep things topical, by using the arrow notation, we may be encouraging C programmers to use objects like structs and that's just silly. Which is kind of the point of much of this thread :)

Perl 6 seemingly is intended to be familiar to a larger audience (in some ways)

Agreed, but I will still miss them. I prefer the -> over the . notation in C as well. Much of the C code I work with pass around lots of structures, between that and hash refs I am so used to typing -> I don't mind it. I understand why they are changing, it will still be a hard habbit to break. :-)

One of the few places (well, OK, the only place so far, but I won't rule out others existing) that I like lvalue methods or subs.