I think this article is spot on. But. I think the root cause here is that many of the tools are build by the community. Great tools cost a lot of money to build, and you need to build the right thing at the right time, the cost needs to be spread across the comminuty. The community is growing and tools are improving. The first generation tools with all their rough edges are being replaced by simpler tools that have incorporated lessons of the first gen. Improvement is accelerating. So when the core team focuses on new features like CLJC, Spec, Transit, Transducers, Datomic, ClojureScript, they are doing things that only the core team can do. There are other more opinionated things (like frameworks) that the core team isn't suited to do, everyone's app is too different.

The thing i love most about clojure is that all the pieces seem to fit together and be working towards a grander architectural vision much larger than just a language or just a database. I use Clojure not because it lets me code my java/javascript stuff a little better, but because this grander vision makes impossible things possible. The thing I am trying to build is not possible in any other ecosystem today.

So I am willing to eat the many little pains described in the article, pains I feel every day, because the grand vision is so powerful, and hope that one day the little stuff will be better.