Yes, it feels a bit like a bait and switch to me. I can understand that - I've been tempted to go down the same route myself... But the messaging around it is all over the place.

On one hand, when they explicitly state that the goal is not for Crystal to be as close to Ruby as possible, that makes me more sympathetic.

At the same time it also makes me less likely to use it anytime soon. Not out of ill will - it's an interesting project and I hope they do well - but hardly any of my Ruby code is CPU constrained, so I have little reason to switch for speed. Had they aimed as close as possible, I might have tried anyway, but every little extra difference makes it less worthwhile.

Of course that's very different for people that actually write code where speed is a major concern and that e.g. haven't been able to use Ruby for that reason.