What I really do not understand, and should be found here, in case others like me read this to find the reasons:

Why in the world wasn’t another symbol chosen? Why the (unspaced) dot (.), of all things? Why force significant space characters where a simple typo of a literally invisible single space completely changes the meaning of the code? Why make Haskell now literally impossible to write with a pen on paper, where one can’t tell if the space is just space or a space?

I seems the reason for releasing something that is known to be at best a stopgap, is that the alternative would be to keep bickering forever. I don’t know what that holdup was, but that argument is fallacious because ignores the utter triviality of solving the above problem:
Just choose a better symbol!(TM) ^^
I would have just used whatever symbol remains unambiguous with regard to spacing, if you take the ANSI characters from 0x20 upwards and remove all the ones that are already used in that context in Haskell.

The weirdest thing is, how this elephant in the room is never even mentioned anywhere I read. It cannot be that nobody but me ever thought of this, but it can also not be that everyone orchestrated to make even naming that solution a taboo like speaking of the devil. So… did people like me miss an important memo? In that case, please, add that memo to the answer for the above.

This would help people like me a lot with understanding how any of this can be a reasonable best choice even for a temporary stopgap, especially in the face of the dangerous threat of falling down the local energy minimum of "good enough", where the motivation left to actually do it right is too weak to fix it properly. As they say: Nothing more permanent in the world, than a kludge. ;)

Or, alternatively:
Just choose a better symbol!(TM) ^^

I, for one, am already preparing a patch for my own installation of GHC, named RecordSelectorSyntax, that treats the selector as just a normal function and lets you define the symbol to use by importing it under a different name. E.g.:

import Portage (recordSelector as (»))
(Preferably, there should be no reserved syntax at all except declaration (=) and some form of escaping. Only overridable defaults.

TL;DR: In any case, the way this was communicated down the stream, to us end users, was a train wreck of KDE4.0 or Firefox Fenix proportions. If I didn’t know SPJ et al to have such a highly respectable track record of wise decisions, I’d think they’d lost all their marbles and gone full PHP.JS. ;)