I can sympathize! We are aiming to maintain most of the expressive power of TLA+ -- ideally everything you need for a concise, high-high level specification, that can be simulated and/or verified -- but with surface syntax that is more approachable coming from a programming background. If you're interested in seeing how it maps to TLA+, you can find much of that in this document: https://github.com/informalsystems/quint/blob/main/doc/lang....

We still have lots of ways to improve, and -- we think -- lots of opportunities to improve our interop and complementary qualities in relation to TLA+ and TLC. But we have found the tools in their current state useful enough to be worth sharing :)