You're definitely right, and from my experience the community has no interest in actually making the developer experience better. It's one of those "the first step to fixing the problem is admitting you have a problem" situations and for the most part the Clojure community can't even admit how bad their tooling is, they'd rather shift blame to the users and pretend that if you can't figure it out it means you're not smart enough to be using it.

I find Clojure is a lot more approachable if you start with Clojurescript / Reagent and go from there. You don't need to be running Clojure on the backend to make use of how awesome Clojurescript is, and it's about 10x more approachable.