Just this weekend I experienced a flash game embedded in a XLS enclosed in an Outlook .eml file. I hope it does not get worse than that, otherwise I am sure we'd be breaking some laws of topology.

Clearly we are not using the same definition of a "production" release. In my vocabulary, production release is a stable release that most businesses except maybe nuclear powerplants can rely on. A release that was thoroughly tested for data-loss bugs, will not break things with another update, has some bugfix schedule and so on. I know you find this definition overly restrictive, but you can't simply "squat" a word with a meaning different from the mainstream. (Or you will create more problems than you solve.) There are certainly people who will be able to use Rakudo Star in the core of their business, but I don't think that is what the release is mainly for.

Rakudo Star is not a production release. In the linked blog pmichaud says he would like to stay away from words like "finished" or "stable" and calls Rakudo Star a "useful" and "usable" release. The "Star" itself means literal *, or "whatever", to get away from commiting versioning or release engineering terms. The release will be simply something you can hack on without major inconveniences.

I have no experience with amphetamines, but overdosing by drugs is seldom a good feeling. And if it does not work, you do might end up as a drooling idiot, because you might stop breathing long enough to damage your brain. If I were to come off this world by my own hand, I sure would have take care to have clean and peaceful mind (which is not exactly what drugs do).

The compiler is expected to significantly reduce time-to-market of new software, because lengthy manual optimization can now be carried out by the compiler.

Oh, so new software takes too long to build because of lengthy manual optimization? That's news indeed. Even if it did, will the compiler find a better polygon intersection algorithm for me? Will it write a spatial hash? Will it find places when I am calculating something in a tight loop and move the code somewhere higher?