The above link is actually a discussion about Dart’s “Monocle Moustache,” so I console myself that when people say it’s ugly, they mean the moustache and not significant whitespace :-)
I'm the originator of that issue. There's been previous proposals, and subsequent ones). I originally proposed different syntaxes, but the current proposal was superior.
I've been amazed at how much interest there has been in this. Every time I think it's over, more people pile in. The only catch is: there are a couple of people who still need to be convinced, and they're actually the important ones. I'm pretty sure that a pull request for this would not be accepted.
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1889