One of the main problems with the Quasar/coroutine based model is that the semantics are quite hard to undersand for developers who are not very familiar with concurrency. They write code that _looks_ synchronous but is actually async. We get a lot of support tickets claiming there's a bug in the platform when the reality is that they don't understand what's going on. I sympathise with them and we probably need to do a better job of hiding the complexities. As you note, the bytecode instrumentation is a bit of a pain but not only that... It also has quite a big impact on performance!
There has been talk of doing some experiments with Akka and that's something I'm interested in exploring. But I think, hypothetically, that writing parts of the platform again in Erlang/OTP would yield huge productivity benefits... gen_fsm offers exactly what we need out of the box. From the little playing around I've done with Erlang, it feels like you can get a small, competent team, up to speed fairly quickly.