Within any culture there are individuals who will act like dickweeds. Likewise, not every feature that you propose is likely to be accepted. Are these cultural problems?
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, I really am curious about the answer. These kinds of discussions tend to be anecdotal (understandably so) or too nebulous and so I'm trying to dive deeper.
I'll be honest: the direction 1.3 went was not a direction I saw as valuable.
Similarly, I felt like the 1.2 work on protocols and datatypes was about 3/5 of what a person would need to use them in general programming. I've talked with some people I consider experts in Clojure and they suggested to me they have some similar feelings.
The community dislike of macros, and a curious insistance on using the most difficult and bug-prone version (not to mention least debuggable) of a macro implementation is another example of a troubling bias in the direction of clojure.
I am not a genius, nor do I claim to have superior information on which direction Clojure should go. All I have is my biases and intuitions, but I don't think I'm alone in their current values.
What exactly did you not like about 1.3? It's faster and a lot numeric stuff no longer needs to be written Java.
As far as 1.2, the only thing I find lacking around protocols and datatypes is reader support and a default constructor fn.
As far as community dislike of macros, I'm not convinced.
I also don't see anything stopping anyone from submitting their CA and pitching a friendlier macro front-end. But as far I can tell most people in the Clojure community are not familiar with Scheme style macros. You'd have to come up with the code, write the tutorials, and market your approach. That it's a lot of work is the only reason I see that it hasn't been done yet - not because anyone is against the idea.
