Autorebase hell is I hope a thing of the past. We made all of the executables involved in the running of pacman static (except msys-2.0.dll obviously, and some post-install scripts, but we try to remove those) and split the update procedure into two parts, "update-core" which handles updating the core of MSYS2 and pacman. The rest of the system update is then completed with "pacman -Su". We've had no reports of update failures since then.

We didn't remove support for symlinks, you can enable them in the MSYS env. var winsymlinks:nativestrict if you want. If symlinks didn't require special permissions, we'd enable them by default, but unfortunately they do. Maybe one day Microsoft will change their minds on this. I can only hope so. I guess you may have meant that we don't create the 'Cygwin special' symlinks that winsymlinks:native falls back to when it doesn't get permissions? Yes those are an interoperability disaster for MSYS2 when native programs read them.