(... and definitional BREAK + CONTINUE ...)
The other Rebol derivatives quickly retreat to implementing dialects in C (or Red/System). They excuse it with "well, it would be too slow otherwise". But they literally don't know how to write and maintain non-trivial systems in the medium being discussed, without so many workarounds that it becomes more an exercise in constrained writing. Projects execute in spite of the language, not because of it... and that's what I'd call a Turing tar-pit.
I want to show cases where the language solves problems in an impressive and novel way... that doesn't fall apart like a house of cards the moment the problem statement changes by one word.
So calling Ren-C an "objective step forward" is accurate. 
The Rebol3 initiative put nearly every decision in Rebol2 under scrutiny, allowing for arbitrary incompatible changes...if they fixed fundamental issues. I found the language in the middle of that discussion. So I assumed "this all needs VERY serious rethinking" was the prevailing belief. But most who were questioning the design had been involved for a decade already, and were burnt out...so they wandered off. The few of us here are all that's left of Rebol3 (and Oldes, who is prolific in wiring up libraries, but not too concerned with language design 
)
The Red crowd had a completely different mission, of an open-source Rebol2 written in a C-like systems dialect. They considered Rebol2 to have been "good enough" to be copied more or less verbatim, and that deviating from it would cause delays and a requirement to write new documentation. If you show them a broken scenario they'll occasionally acknowledge it as bad. But the overwhelming tactic is to say "no language is perfect" (and Gregg can fill pages with saying this in about 100 different ways) vs. attempting to fix the problem.
Despite that, today's Red is incompatible with Rebol2 for seemingly trivial reasons, and is still missing many of its features (and backpedaling on open source). "Whatever Nenad likes" seems to be the edge cases of the GUI design. Because regardless of what they say publicly about the language or their goals, they envision RED.EXE winning the battle against the ever-bloating web browser. (They don't say it often, because their quirky insecure 32-bit design sounds like a poor bet against the sunk cost of the globally-vetted browser everyone has installed already.)
I'm a fan of consensus... when people are willing to work toward it... and you've been helpful so far!
I feel that the examples I look at provide a lot of food for thought. The Whitespace Dialect alone provides years of deep questions to work on. Emulating Rebol2 is a challenge. When I mix it all up with code that hasn't been written by me (e.g. @BlackATTR's Query and @gchiu's Midcentral) it gives me a good gauge of what is still left to do before I can be happy.
It would be good if you had some small project to add to the continuous integration roundup--something that I'd take responsibility for having an answer to keeping working as the system evolves. It would be code you were invested in, but not too invested in. 
Small scale, so no sequencing of genomes. This may help empathize with both what the joys of the medium are that I seek to distill and enhance, as well as the practicalities of what a slog this can be...
A new country to give a Rebol talk in! I've moved to the other side of the US (vertically) and have been busy as well...