I wasn't trying to imply any sort of wrong decision on the part of Parrot developers for not working on MoarVM. I tried to make sure that was obvious. Perhaps I failed.
More than that, Moar's development began in secret around that time
I'm aware, which is one of the things I was alluding to when I mentioned "among other reasons" for not working on MoarVM. Beyond not knowing it existed, when they did there was probably a feeling of betrayal. I'm not trying to ignore that. The shame is that some of these people would most likely have enjoyed working on MoarVM if things had played out differently.
My impression then was that, if Rakudo hadn't chased away Parrot developers and Parrot were free to ignore pesky things like backwards compatibility, deprecation, and users who wanted it to continue to work, Moar looked a lot like Parrot would have after the same time period. It was pretty disappointing.
That actually sounds like praise to me (barring some of the architectural missteps you allude to earlier in your statement). That MoarVM was able to mostly get to where you think Parrot could have been if it had been able to ignore a lot of extremely hoary and cumbersome problems seems like a good thing. Did you find it disappointing because of MoarVM specifically, or because of the realized loss of potential from Parrot?
In the end, if the Parrot split solved some P6 roadblocks, and spurred more rapid P6 development, which I believe it did, I have to count the action as a wide choice. I found Parrot interesting in it's goals, but it's target of being a VM for scripting languages was starting to get competition from the JVM, which I'm not sure it could compete with. P6, on the other hand, still hasn't seem a competitor feature-wise IMHO to make me think it's future is in doubt from an outside source (whether it will ever be successful, however you define it, is a different question). Of course your level of investment and interest in each of the two projects may cause you to weigh the situation entirely differently.