> The fact that Leiningen is both the go-to and unofficial was a tad bewildering.
Clojure now has an official, built-in CLI that mostly supersedes Leiningen.
You can just install Clojure itself, create a 'deps.edn' (which can be as simple as '{}') and get going at a REPL by running 'clojure' or 'clj'.
Packages are auto-installed - in some ways I find it even easier than node, where npm is a separate tool/install sometimes. :)
> Once I got set up, the development experience in VSCode was also quite underwhelming.
There's a VSCode editor plugin called Calva[2] which has developed pretty thoroughly over the last year or so. Outside of IntelliJ/Cursive, it's starting to become one of the more feature-complete systems and it has plenty of features that you'd expect.
[1]: https://clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli
[2]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=betterth...