I've started using Nim couple of months before last year's Advent of Code, after I've been reading about Nim both here and on Reddit.
As a Python user, I was immediately drawn to Nim's elegant syntax, which looked to me like "ok, just copy-paste my Python code, and declare some variables, and voila: 10-100x faster Python!", which is 80% true. The remaining 20% were "this works in Python, why doesn't work in Nim?" questions, which were promptly answered by the great Nim IRC community. I soon realized that those differences are what makes Nim great, and I began to really like the language.
I decided to solve AoC 2017 in both Python and Nim [0] so I could directly compare my solutions. This was a great experience for me, and I've learnt a lot.
In the past year I started using/liking Nim more and more (I have used Nim even at my work (numerical calculations, before done in Numpy)). This year I'm gonna solve AoC solely in Nim.
From my experience, your hunch is right.
If you have any Nim questions, let me know.