The fear is actually completely opposite: people would misuse these annotations without understanding what they do and then complain that Dart VM "is slow".
As I said: I'd love to convert these lists to annotations. Don't tell anyone but we actually have inlining annotations[1] which we use when writing tests.
> Do you use such a layer as a "Well structured intermediate language" in Dart VM?
I don't understand the question. Dart VM uses intermediate representation when compiling, which is an implementation detail (unlike CLR IL - which well specified input to the VM essentially)
[1] https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleedi...)