Thanks, Marc. That's an admirable attitude, and I wouldn't want more hype than what you already wrote on page 1:
With appropriate declarations in the source code the executable programs generated by the compiler run roughly as fast as equivalent C programs.
That is not hype... it is reality!
But there's a real question, which I don't know the answer to: who do you want to use Gambit? If you only want experts like Brad (who 10 years ago told me to use Gambit, but I was intimidated (and thanks for the GC tip!)) to use Gambit, the manual is fine. Maybe you only mean Gambit to be a tool of the serious scientific computing community.
I think Gambit is suitable for the development of many real-world applications. Execution speed is not a problem, there are many extensions for real-world applications (FFI, threads, ...), and the debugging environment is the best that I know. The main problem is that marketing takes time and currently Gambit is mostly a one man effort (actually Brad Lucier has helped quite a bit in the past 3-4 years). I'm hoping that the features of Gambit 4 and the new license will attract more developpers/contributors to Gambit and that this will broaden its user base.
Marc