Paul may have been hurting perception of Scala community by his rants a bit lately. But the fork is a greatly welcomed! All the things Paul said make sense. The fork can prove the value of those ideas.
Simpler compiler => more compiler developers => more productive => better compiler => better for the whole community!
As for Typesafe. There are doing great job. Just two releases ago Scala was not compatible even between minor releases. Stability, documentation, training, driving the community, good roadmap for 2.12, etc. Great job! Plus they are build a great framework around akka and play which is gaining traction.
Policy is actually not really a fork. Forks are, imho, projects which diverge code base one day and there's really no sharing between them anymore. Paul is merging from scalac all the time. It really is just vastly simplified scalac with some wise decisions like modularizing some aspects (like parallel collections).
BTW: Anybody worried about a friction while trying to push a bold change in a team of more than one person? Have you ever worked in a team of more than one? :-) Just do it. Prove it. Dismiss the FUD.
Fist questions on my mind: 1) Future? Is this repo intended to pull from scalac or diverge more? 2) Dropping reflection? Does it means removal of macros as well? For the time being or for good? 3) How about leaf node invariance in collections (and other collection stuff you talked about)?