People complain that there’s “too many parentheses”. People like to complain about dumb stuff.

😂I'm off on a tangent here, but this made me laugh so much! As a Maths teacher I see all the time people complaining about "this is ambiguous - add more parentheses for clarity!" when the reality is Maths is never ambiguous and they've just forgotten 2 of the most important rules of Maths (meaning we already have the correct amount). 😂 These very same people often put the brackets in the wrong place anyway when they do add them adding/removing brackets

there are very few “starter” Clojure jobs; they mostly expect you to have years of experience.

That's because the language is made for people who wrote java for the last 10 years. It's cool and all, but it's horrible for learning programming when you compare it to cl or scheme. Neither of them break language uniformity and simplicity in order to accommodate java interop, while also having decades worth of excellent teaching material.

It’s a Lisp language which is the oldest kind.

Fortran, COBOL, ALGOL are older

Instead of “object oriented”, I think if it as verb oriented. Each statement is a verb (function) possibly followed by all the nouns you want to apply it to. Easy peasy, right?

I think you're over complicating the explanation, it's just a different notation:

(1 + 2 + 3) == (+ 1 2 3)

(1 + (2 * 3)) == (+ 1 (* 2 3))

People complain that there’s “too many parentheses”. People like to complain about dumb stuff.

I think it's got more to do with everything seemingly being completely different. Most languages have C-style syntax, and python is like the only popular exception. It's like knowing only latin and having to learn cyrilic or alphabet.