Why do you find it ominous?

Scala 2.12, the next version that's currently at milestone 4, is going to be a huge release, having a new backend, optimizations, Java 8 interop, improvements for the type system, refactorings, basically the real deal.

But Scala needs to be production quality and stable enough for real work TM. Like when they were pushing experiments in Scala, people were complaining that Scala breaks too often.

Apparently now people are afraid that the experiments have moved to Dotty. You can't please everybody.