The “status quo stories” approach seems extremely weird to me. Have any other working groups been using the approach and finding success? If I were working on something and wanted to adapt to user feedback, I feel it’d be easier to break it down through notes rather than framing nuggets of criticism as stories.
I think the point is to get more of an overall idea what the problems and potential solutions are, before getting into the details of fixing particular issues (which is too complicated for most Rust users to follow). So it seems like a good idea to me in order to get a deep understanding of the problem space.
The approach seems unique from what I’ve seen of the other working groups, but I can’t say I’m too familiar with them. It strikes me as a use of the “persona” user-centric design technique, which I had a little experience with in school but have never seen applied to programming language design before. Personally, I think this is a very good use-case for it and I’m excited to see where it leads!