Is it that "Some people" don't like those, or that "some people" have been to Algol-style languages first, and they can't easily adapt to the other style?
>Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery.
Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like.
After that, adding other languages does not mean much if they all share the same paradigms and syntax style. It's like a Common Lisp person also learning Scheme, Racket, Clojure etc -- in the end it's not much difference.
Going from those to different paradigms is what makes an actual difference (e.g. learning Coq, or Erlang, or Haskell, or Lisp or Forth, etc).