I like to read about various problems in language design, as someone who is relatively naive to its deeper intricacies it really helps broaden my view. That said I have seen a trend towards adding various bells and whistles to languages without any sort of consideration as to whether it actually, in a measurable way, makes the language better.

The downside to adding an additional feature is that you are much more likely to introduce leaky abstraction (even things as minor as syntactical sugar). Your language has more "gotchas", a steeper learning curve, and a higher chance of getting things wrong or not understanding what is going on under the hood.

For this reason, I have always appreciated relatively simple homoiconic languages that are close-to-the-metal. That said, the universe of tools and build systems around these languages has been a growing pile of cruft and garbage for quite some time, for understandable reasons.

I envision the sweet spot lies at a super-simple system language with a tightly-knit and extensible metaprogramming layer on top of it, and a consistent method of accessing common hardware and I/O. Instant recompilation ("scripting") seamlessly tied to highly optimized compilation would be ideal while I am making a wishlist :)