I had the same experience. Spent over an hour trying to strap all the components into a working system just for it to trow error after error. So I gave up learning Clojure and instead went into Pharo. Self-contained environment trivial to set-up, same live environment typical of lisps, but approached from the Smalltalk side. I enjoy it.

and moving from Racket to Clojure is an easier step than straight to clojure.

Clojure sucks.

Go with Lisp instead. Or OCaml. Both are purer and leaner than the JVM-addled morass that is Clojure.