Hello Andrei,
The nice part about refcounting is that for the most part you don't need to cripple the language.
I think people are trying to say that disallowing use of GC stuff wouldn't cripple the language.
Also there is one thing that -nogc would have over what you are talking about; you could use it on some modules and not others. If I have some performance critical code where attempting to use the GC would break it's perf contract, I can put it in it's own module and compile just it with -nogc and then link it in with code that does use the GC.
