Red seems like a very ambitious project to be completed by a single developer. I've only briefly looked at the syntax, but it seemed to me that it's not very clear. The excess use of brackets is visually confusing.
Too many brackets is rarely the initial complaint. Usually people complain about the lack of parens in function calls. Free-ranging evaluation is an important design element, but it can take some getting used to. One of those "With great power..." things.
Once you start writing in it you realize how much the syntax often reads like an English sentence. And the brackets make perfect sense when you begin to understand blocks. And besides; its no more than curly braces in C and definitely fewer than parentheses in Lisp.