I understand and agree with the chicken and egg problem. Hope was that with Intel and Cray supporting F2008 and gfortran having partial support the three compiler problem is solved for application developers. But we are still seeing not many applications with Fortran 2008.
It will be easier to convince management if there are crucial applications which will not run on our hardware without F2008 support. At the moment fixing customer issues, helping maintain Classic Flang and contributing to F18 takes up most of our time.