Languages with lots of symbols tend to be incredibly difficult to read at first. If you have a programming language where a typical program looks like line noise, it means the programming language is going to likely have a very steep learning curve (because a lot of those operators are probably not going to have their standardized meaning).
Think about Python. A well-written Python program is similar to the pseudocode you would write on a napkin. For a concrete example, look at the whitepaper's definition of I1 in pseudo-code. The "pseudo-Hoon" implementation of I1 looks totally different from the pseudocode, and to even begin to read the Hoon code, I would have to look up the meanings of approximately 10 different operators.
I guess there are two different camps of language design -- the Perl / Ruby / shell camp where having lots of non-standard operators in your syntax is desirable, and the C / Python / Lua camp which prefers a small set of operators with meanings close to their "standard" mathematical ones.