Thinking of next, as usual is only interesting for the usual type provider demos, not for the working programmer using C# and VB.NET across EF, Forms, WPF, UWP, ASP.NET MVC, IoT Core, HoloLens.

This. As an industrial programmer: F# was awesome 10 years ago, I don't really crave for new language features. I want an industrial strength tooling and ecosystem to support this awesome language, not new language features.

To be painfully blunt: The language is really nice as it is. I would prefer it would expand on the bolted-on batteries included utilities rather than new contrived ways of code golfing.

What is critical from industrial point of view that the fundamentals are now and "forever" rock solid. Not how many new language features it will gain.

See C for reference. Nobody uses C because it gets new ways to write shorter code. People choose C for stability[0], not because it's horrible language or because it's a beautiful language.

F# would be fantastical, if it would ossify like C. Then I could write it for the rest of my programming career.

[0] Yes, C moves forward, but with a geological pace

I think your definition of "working programmer" is a lot more specific than you're implying here. There are numerous working programmers using F# successfully today, in a broad number of scenarios. Machine Learning is our next one to tackle.

I don't need F# for ML.NET and still get to use it on the above scenarios where F# gets a no entry to play allowance.