I think the difference with Go is the Google backing. Go ignores community feedback, but not the feedback it gets from within Google. So at least it can justify itself by saying, this works for Google, and that's proof enough its pretty damn good.

Elm's BDFL cannot make such claim, since he doesn't use it to build products closely similar in nature to most users of Elm. I think this is both good and bad. Its good in that Elm is more ideological in nature, since the creator is not motivated to break his ideologies by real world constraints. Its bad, because people who have those constraints must find ways to shoehorn the beautiful ideology, into the dirty real world. That's where a lot of the user pain comes from.