I am trying to use Squeak in a new project.  I really want to use 
Squeak, and keep running into questions about the quality of the Squeak 
image, and would like some community comment on the following 
observations.

1) The VM seems quite solid and has decent performance.  This is not 
the current concern.
2) The implementation of Balloon is only partially complete.  The 
handling of text and transforms is not done.
3) The old ST80 image had a lot of design elegance in the classes, 
while too much of the Squeak image I am running into seems less 
organized.
4) Where in the ST80 image there was a hierarchy of objects ending in 
Paragraph that deal with displaying, in Morphic I find NewParagraph 
that has no superclass other than Object.  This in and of itself is not 
a problem, but that asParagraph returns the old one, and it can not be 
directly displayed on a Canvas is an issue.  It looks almost like 
Morphic was really ported from Self and was not tied into the Smalltalk 
class library more than was minimally necessary.

What I guess I am questioning is whether the image has enough integrity 
/ quality of design to use in a production project.  If there are a lot 
of unfinished stuff in the image, then our maintenance effort grows 
with the amount of the existing code we try to use.  Nothing is without 
bugs, but part of what I associate with "Smalltalk" is more attention 
to design elegance.  If I had plenty of time I might be tempted to take 
it down to the base image (minimal computing model) and build it up 
with a clean OpenGL based UI.  But, that would be way too much effort 
for the advantages Smalltalk offers.  I do not mind fixing bugs, but 
the regularity of lost time on them is getting old, and it is very 
difficult to know what the proper behavior is in too many cases.

Michael