Isn't vale basically still in the R&D phase? That's how it has felt, certainly. I would expect specific commits on specific branches to work and that's it - no that they have a compiler that arbitrary people can use to start building things.
Then again, their README doesn't really indiciate this and does say "Try Vale" so idk. But it seems very R&D/POC at this point.
I don't understand, what set of programmers never (do/want to?) to reach 1.0? Are you referencing something like the Tex versioning scheme?
Conventionally 1.0 is just the inflection point where things are featureful and stable enough that you start making guarantees about the stability of whatever interface/contract/API/whatever that matter to the consumer of whatever you are building.
At least in the past a lot of useful (and actually 'finished') tools were forever at a some 0.x version, especially before semantic versioning got popular. I guess they just wanted some increasing version number but just '1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...' looked too weird, so they went for '0.1, 0.2, 0.3, ...'.
Then again, their README doesn't really indiciate this and does say "Try Vale" so idk. But it seems very R&D/POC at this point.