I have found the split has only gotten better with time. It used to be most package maintainers assumed you were using nightly/beta. The last holdouts I see are diesel and serde which have instructions for using nightly. Even then they realize no one wants to ship code on nightly so they provide directions for making a building using stable rust. Once the procedural macros stuff is stabilized they can stop.

I have been extremely pleased with the rust community and the rust maintainers.

And no I was not paid by them to say this... :)

That article had so many inaccuracies and/or was hyperbolic. Most of the points there are plain wrong.

http://xion.io/post/programming/rust-nightly-vs-stable.html#...

I think the Rust community didn't take the discussion very far, because it felt like the comparison to Python 2 vs 3 was out of proportion. The single most important difference is that stable Rust code is always compatible with nightly, and comparisons that gloss over that difference feel frustrating. (Other folks have raised more detailed objections too, like the macro features that are about to land in stable.)