Well, it can be confusing for large sites to use this, or even small ones. So Google is working up new ideas on this implementation.
John Mueller of Google said they are “working on something neat” around rel-alternate-hreflang and want some beta testers. He wouldn’t tell me what it was but if you want to try it, you need to sign an NDA and be willing to test it on your site.
If I had to guess, it would be a feature within Webmaster Tools that let’s you assign the same sort of hreflang logic but not in code, but rather via a tool in Webmaster Tools. That is a complete guess, it may be better reporting based on your markup or might be something completely different that may blow my mind.
So if you want to try it out, check out John’s post on Google+.
Forum discussion at Google+.
