Check out this response from Monad Architect Jeffrey Snover to some constructive criticism from the community. In it he justifies some of the design decisions that were made. He really tries to drive home the point that Monad is primarily a shell language and secondarily a scripting language.
He also mentions that there will be a new drop coming “next week” and it will include extended support for auto-completion/intellisense which is something a lot of the community has been clammoring for. Can’t wait!