I think the "feels" is your main problem. Looking at the code samples here, there's not much you could cut out in more high-level languages. In a direct comparison with e.g. MacRuby, F-Script or Objective-J, not much is gained (mostly the header files and some manual memory management). Objective-C usually looks a bit messier than it actually is. Lisp programmers don't notice parens, Objective-C programmers don't notice anything but the messages (unless they have to).

Generic GUI code always seems a bit messy. Yes, for simple apps your usual JQuery functions are small enough, but that gets messy quick enough -- it's like handling X11 events in a switch loop, easy enough when you have to react to a couple of simple events, but once you got enough going on.

Cocoa is mostly made for bigger applications. There might be some slightly easier way for mobile apps, but the gain would be minute and is really offset by having one paradigm for GUIs that stretches device classes.