After the first Rakudo Star release, I personally volunteered to spend my Parrot time fixing bugs which affected Rakudo, improving the performance of Rakudo, and adding features for Rakudo, in that order. I offered several suggestions (including native registers, better profiling, object system improvements) and was repeatedly told not to work on them. I will say this, though: there was no friction to working on the profiling system (though it went unused). This happened to other people as well.

I've documented this at length elsewhere.

Those specific features we were told explicitly not to work on were on the top of the list of "Reasons Rakudo Must Abandon Parrot". I find that disingenuous, as if Parrot had been set up for failure.

Perhaps I should apply Hanlon's Razor here, but that feels even less charitable.