Part of the problem could have been that I was using Spacemacs and package support and that may have broken it but circling back around this connects with meeting people halfway, I don't want to learn Emacs style control, I know Vim, Vim works elsewhere, and I just want to write Clojure. I can do that now with Cursive so the trade off isn't worth it. A lot of people learning feel and think this way in my experience, especially if I selling Clojure to someone who is reluctant, anecdotally at least 4 people I know have followed this path, I am sure it extends beyond them.

Per the big files, its not so much Clojure but output at the REPL. Especially as a noob accidentally grabbing way to much data for a buffer is really easy, Emacs hangs, REPL and process dies and has to be rebooted and you have to bring up everything again. This is non-trivial friction when learning and should really be handled gracefully by the editor.

As for everything else regarding Emacs and learning all these points stand and are valid but still don't address the problem of someone wanting to learn Clojure and instead having to learn Emacs + Clojure + Cider. For someone just starting on the path most won't have more than 3 files of CLJ and may not even interact with Lein or Deps. Refactoring IS important but not to them. I just don't think the trade off is worth it for someone just toying around with CLJ in their free time. It may not be the best metric but "time to hello world" and "time to blog" matter to people coming in because it shows that the promise that they are sold is something that they can reach and achieve.