It took me months to really get used to CoffeeScript, and I certainly left in a few unnecessary commas after the first day.
The rest of what you wrote I agree with.
But I think the problem is that people are dismissing CoffeeScript before they have learned it, just like I did originally.
I now vastly prefer to use CoffeeScript (or rather ToffeeScript these days, but thats another issue) whereas initially I thought that CoffeeScript was a joke.
Then I had to learn CoffeeScript because it was used in a library that I needed to understand.
It was only _after_ I had invested the time in learning CoffeeScript that I could see the advantages. In fact, up until that point that I had learned it, CoffeeScript _was not_ an advantage for me -- it was a liability, because I didn't know how to use it. When you aren't familiar with a language then whatever advantages it may have are more than offset by the fact that you don't know what you are doing.
I think this is a problem that pretty much every new paradigm shares to some degree. It is very difficult for the average person to emotionally get behind the effort to learn a new way of doing things, and psychologically we just aren't wired to make an accurate judgement about whether that will pay off.
Judgments and decisions are actually emotional/subconscious and the rationalization comes afterward.