balance,
WebBeans and the rest of Java EE 6 are very important to us and we will develop tooling around these technology stacks as they roll more into the main stream. Possibly in 8.5, Java EE 6 support hasn’t been ironed down internally yet.
As for the “down a non main-stream java alley” comment, I don’t know what you are referring to there. I don’t know of any obscure 1-off tech stack that we are developing tooling towards that hasn’t been requested by at least many 10s of thousands of our users. We don’t make tooling decisions lightly.