We can start with that, upon starting down the road to learning a (IMO great) but very, very different syntax than most other languages in OCaml, Dune then asks you to write a lisp file to do basic configuration and I suspect 90%+ people who want to explore just say "fuck it" the second they internalize this.

I'm sure there's a crowd, especially here on HN, that views this as some sort of purity test for the language, but in my opinion it's needlessly obtuse over <insert more readable and traditional and lintable type here> used by modern build systems.

Then there's the fact that several `init` commands don't actually fully `init` a project (and up until recently, the very example in OCaml's getting started documentation was broken).

Then there's this insanity

    dune build
    dune test
    dune exec # hahaha no, no, this doesn't work.

Then you gotta manually tape together crap between opam and dune (and don't get me started on how insane the lockfile situation is -- I swear to god I complained once and someone told me I should learn to use nix!).

This is all very fun and yak shave-ey and I generally grin and bear it, but boy do I totally get why most people look at me like I'm a weirdo because I like this language.