It’s similar to learning declensions in Russian/German/Latin: weird and seemingly pointless to English speakers, and then usually fully internalized after a few months, with better intuition for costs and benefits of syntax vs cases.
I’d argue that the Clojure learning curve is significantly shorter than that also.
The best criticisms of Clojure (and I’ve written a lot in it) have nothing to do with parentheses, but rather the difficulties of grokking other people’s dynamic, untyped code.