Yes, I am aware of the discussions.
I think it’s unfortunate that Kotlin can’t quite make up its mind here, although it’s understandable for a pre 1.0 language (we already switched from [Test] to @Test so I assume further changes are not ruled out).
I think it would be unfortunate to ship 1.0 with the option to either use @ or not and the option to either capitalize annotations or not. This will lead to messy code base.
I’m probably a bit biased since I was part of the experts group that created the Java annotation spec but for better or for worse, “@” and capitalization are so widespred in Java that Kotlin should probably adopt it as well.