Go has always had a very strong dependency on GOPATH and the other path-based semantics that are quite core to the language's import system, so it's understandable that a large change would be quite hard to pull off (for political reasons if nothing else). Personally (having been burned by this mis-feature regularly ever since I started using Go almost 5 years ago) I don't really like this design, but to quote George Lucas "it's stylistically designed to be that way".