To be fair, I meant it in both contexts at the same time. A more polite term might be "opinionatedly retro". Go's conservative bend is both a positive and negative.
Go isn't a research project. It's more a manifesto on programming philosophy born of "old man rage" in language form. This works out mostly because the old men in question happen to include Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. However, that results in a very specific feel and set of tradeoffs in Go.