However, everytime Go is discussed at HN I see many posts criticizing the language for various reasons and this has put me off getting started learning Go.
A lot of the criticisms turned me off as well, but I dove in anyway.
I stopped paying attention to the criticisms when I found out how incredibly productive I was able to be in Go.
Give it a try and make your own call on it. The cognitive overhead of jumping into Go is so small compared to many other languages.
I'm not using Go now, though I have tried it out years ago. Your point is exactly why it stays on my radar for possible future use. Especially if you consider any sort of business aspect, ramping up the help. I would strongly consider using it for any serious backend project in a business environment due to the performance, ease of learning and compatibility promise.
Some of the criticisms of Go are valid and some are just haters doing what haters do--hating. Keep in mind Go is very young for a programming language. It's only about 6 years old, but it's use is becoming more and more widespread as it matures.
Although you are correct in that the standard library is pretty much all you need to write CLI apps, this library is definitely useful if you're willing to pull in a third-party dependency: https://github.com/codegangsta/cli
I have one script that writes postgres, does a HTTP request and needs to read file. 100 locs resulted in 7.2M binary size.