I used to dislike OOP and favor functional programming languages, until I started working with Smalltalk. I guess the fact that blocks are closures and also first-class objects make up the difference somehow. I learned that programming paradigm is not the main factor I appreciate in a language, but also the elegant/coherent design, simplicity, liveness of the programming environment etc.

Also since most of the time developers spend debugging programmings, today I think languages should be designed with improved debugging features in mind. Statically programming languages are doing great progress here (always heard great things about error messages from Rust). Smalltalk and Common Lisp OTH, besides having nice error messages, also have exceptions with resumable semantics. The hability to always get a debugger during an exception without unwinding the stack is such a huge help (specially for dynamic languages), allowing one to fix a running program and continue working.

I maintain/develop a complex Smalltalk GUI desktop application and rarely restart it during development (which always take a while, since stuff like connecting and loading data from the database takes some time). Also I can always fire up the debugger to inspect objects I want to change (like dialogs etc), edit code and run it in any frame of the stack (like a REPL everywhere) etc. Maintaining this codebase in a dynamic programming language with exceptions that use the traditional termination model would be a nightmare, every crash would require a restart, and you don't have a compiler to help you. It's no surprise that people just turned to statically typing for this kind of system.