Thank you for these comments they are super interesting to me as a relatively new Clojure programmer.

Can I ask two related questions -

1. Reading between the lines it sounds like the mutability issue arises from interop, both in the core code and any dependencies that wrap Java?

2. If yes, curious why did the folks involved did not write native Clojure libraries to eliminate the (worst?) blocking dependencies (or patch the Clojure wrapper libs)?

I ask 2 because my understanding is interop was partly a bootstrap strategy for the language and there was always (I think?) an assumption that the native Clojure library ecosystem would grow and make interop less necessary. Is that not happening enough?