Erlang's syntax is not a problem. It can actually help editors like Emacs to indent the code more intelligently. Eg if you're in a clause of a case expression and you pressed Return without pressing comma first, the editor can infer that this is the end of the expression and indent the next line accordingly (to line up with the `case` above).
More generally speaking, if you're not willing to overlook minor issues of syntax in order to get to use tonnes of awesome stuff that it gives you access to... well, in my eyes you're more of a fashion-conscious fanboy than a pragmatic engineer.
If you have trouble remembering what comes when, here's how it works: comma is "and", semicolon is "or", and full stop is "end of definition". These are Prolog's legacy.
Throwing out single assignment and introducing workarounds for pattern matching to still work is a bad idea. So is introducing loops. There are very good reasons for why Erlang is the way it is. The language was not designed by a committee; most of the design decisions have been driven by user requirements. Single assignment is one of such decisions -- it wasn't made because Joe Armstrong was a fan of functional programming, it was made because it made the programs easier to read and debug, enabled hot code reloading, and made the GC simpler. And loops? Loops are close to worthless when you can have higher-order functions like map, filter and fold. I've never missed loops in a year of writing Erlang; come to think of it, I rarely use loops in the Ruby code I write anymore.
LFE is a project with much more potential. It stays close to Erlang semantically, while adding features that Erlang does not have, like real macros, and that's where the real added value is.