Wayne,
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. That being said: My own personality is divided here into three parts, too.
As a mentor of the Buildship project, I'd simply say... yes, certainly, they should be in.
But if I'm switching my role to a Planning Council member, or to an EPP lead, I come to a completely different judgement. Very different. We've seen so many projects in the past that had problems with all the little things that are important for being part of the Simultaneous Release. You are implying that all the Simultaneous Release Requirements are easy to comply with, and that was (too) many times my own thinking, but experience tells us another story. They are harder to meet than we think, especially for new and inexperienced projects, and there are good reasons why mature projects define their feature freeze and API freeze for earlier milestones in order to have more time to stabilise. On the one hand we have projects working on their ramp-down plan... on the other hand we have new projects that are thinking about joining for the first time... this doesn't feel right to me.
Keep in mind, we are talking here about a project joining late that didn't have an existing codebase (nor userbase) some months ago. This kind of risk feels far too high to me.
I think it is not only fair, it is even a good idea to ask for the judgement of some independent Gradle experts. I see this more as a replacement of missing community feedback, definitively not an offence like in your mail.
Speaking of community: From a community point of view I'd appreciate to have Gradle support. But even then I prefer to have a stable 1.0 release at a later time, maybe together with Mars SR1, instead of a 0.x release that has been pushed into the June release.
So what are the alternatives? How would it feel to open the door with Mars SR1 for them? That would give them some time to build up a community of early adopters, people who are really willing to help finding the first serious bugs, building a community of more developers that get in touch with the code base.
Other ideas for alternatives that we can discuss with them?
So far I'm not convinced that this push is the direction that we (as a community) should go (which is my polite way of writing -1).