> Do you know if they intend to fix the need for phoney code paths?

It's a purposeful restriction imposed by the Go compiler, but not by the Go language specification.

And I think the idea is to encourage explicitness, and force cases like these:

    if cond {
        return ...
    } else {
        return ...
    }

Into a simpler:

    if cond {
        return ...
    }
    return ...

Reasonable people can disagree over whether this is a Good Thing.