I dove into Scala before Clojure because lisp was so alien to me. After a couple months of Scala, I still felt like I didn't know where to begin with a blank slate, though I was eventually productive.
When I finally gave Clojure a shot, I was building things my first week. Kinda like my first experience with Ruby.
Clojure felt like a better Ruby to me. The aesthetics that drew me to Ruby were improved in Clojure.
> Is there a reason why Rubists prefer a completely different
> paradigm such as Clojure?
In this way, Erlang/Elixir is more enjoyable for me. I much prefer the Erlang module system (Python and Node.js get a special mention here as well) vs. what you get with Ruby, PHP, Java, etc.
These are not good reasons, but they are my reasons.