I personally welcome this decision. I am fairly happy with the current syntax and I enjoy the explicit "does what it says" nature of Go code. None of the proposed alternatives would have made error handling more robust, they were pure syntactic sugar with no nutritional value.
Saying no to multiple proposals when you feel that the status quo is better can be difficult to do and I am happy that the Go team is able to make these kinds of decisions.
Not sure what's causing the UI issues but another way to go about this is to create a custom collection and configure your browser to use it. This way you can control what shows up in "recommended". IIRC you have to use nightly, beta or a custom build like Fennec to allow using a custom collection.
instructions for managing collections
making FF user a custom collection
collections web UI