Make the package management more Cargo-like and I'd probably adopt it wholesale; whenever I've tried Julia in the past the user experience of just getting started has been the off-putting part.
It takes a bit time to get into because it merges the concept of packages and environments.
Could you explain what you mean here? The point of environments is to manage packages and dependencies, so by definition they're going to be closely coupled. It seems something about it seemed unintuitive to you though, so I'd like to understand what it was.
Also, Pluto is a marvel - seems to fix all of my complaints about Jupyter and is trivially easy to use.