Matz is awesome. I'm looking over the slides for his RubyConf 2003 presentation, and the third slide is titled "How Ruby Sucks." The fourth slide lists specific problems, and the rest of the presentation talks about what needs to be done.
His slides also talk about starting from scratch with Ruby2 (the language) and Rite (the VM). I'm wary of the start from scratch by committee approach — Perl 6 and E17 are prime examples of how this approach can fail spectacularly.