It's definitely an improvement, but most of the syntax complexity seems to come precisely from supporting all the annoyances of Objective-C.
The feature I most miss from other programming languages like Nim is meta programming. In Objective-C you had synthesized properties to generate all the boilerplate code, but in Swift you don't, so to copy certain Objective-C patterns you have to manually write your own private instance variable plus a computed property to control access and side effects. Stuff which is trivially hidden behind a macro. Come on, even Java allows use of annotations to generate code at compile time on Android.
Of course you can argue then that maybe Swift code should not use Objective-C patterns, but hey, I'm still porting and learning. And maybe Swift 2 by the end of the year will have this feature, just like the usage of the where keyword inside conditionals was added recently in 1.2.
I also dislike that there are no forward declarations, so instead of being able to put all your class public API in a single block you have to mingle it with setter/getters' implementations. I guess it's time to use a documentation generation tool and read that instead of reading header files.
