I'm happy if that feature has been descoped because when I last read up on it, it seemed like it was being ramrodded in by an inner circle who were hardly interested in constructive criticism even from other Ruby core maintainers.
I had a talk with Matz 1-on-1 about 6 months back and expressed my doubts about namespaces :) He's a nice guy, he just smiled.
I had a similar experience when I asked him what he thought about vars being able to end in a question mark. Very nice guy who probably hears a lot of very bad ideas.