But this kind of version skip has some precedents. At least the Winamp "we messed up 3 so badly that we're going to skip a version" 5, comes to my mind.
I'll begin with the standard disclaimer that I'm a bit out of touch with the Perl community (but that won't stop me from commenting). Technically, this has been done before with the abandonment of ECMAScript 4 in favor of skipping from ECMAScript 3 to ECMAScript 5.
Is perl 6 messed up? I haven't had the time to look at it, but it doesn't seem to.
It would have to get substantially less vapor-y to even qualify as "messed up".
I didn't want to imply that. It was only the reason for winamp version skipping.