(I'm not going to argue any silly pseudo-intellectual ontological rebuttal of "oh but it's not really a release!" because other people have no trouble building productive things with Rakudo, like they've done for the other two releases of Rakudo Star and the other thirty three releases of Rakudo.)
And according to Rakudo status page (http://rakudo.org/status) below are the common things that don't quite work yet:
* big integers
* nested package/grammar/class declarations
* typed arrays and attributes
* state variables
* multi-level wrapping
* macros
* threads/concurrency
* longest-token matching
* :dba adverb in regexes
... a silly pseudo-intellectual ontological rebuttal of "oh but it's not really a release!"
Are you suggesting there's a better approach to develop software than incremental delivery and design changes based on feedback from real users? That contradicts the experience of the people developing Perl 6, but I'm sure many of us would entertain contrary-but-concrete evidence.
>Are you suggesting ...
No, I'm suggesting that when someone complains that they still can't use perl 6 after all these years it's dishonest and overly defensive to try and claim that an 80% release that's apparently been released multiple times makes their complaint a complaint of ignorance.
A more honest approach would be to respond "well, that's true but we're working on it and you can help by using what we have so far".
I don't read that in any sense in what you wrote before ("Perl 6 is somewhere on the horizon").
I don't know anyone's specific needs to deploy Perl 6 for Serious Production Code, but I do know that multiple implementations have been available for five and a half years such that anyone interested could evaluate its suitability and that the purpose of the Rakudo Star releases is to produce code usable for more and more people.
Anyway I'm a "glass is half full" type of person and I view the 85-90% has a good thing (and I think the "boss", ie. Larry Wall would agree :)