It took me a few attempts. What eventually worked was just getting used to one major feature of it, barfing and slurping, and after that it all clicked.

Switch? They're not mutually exclusive.

Instead of paredit, I use adjust-parens with Evil and bind << and >> to lisp-indent-adjust-parens and lisp-dedent-adjust-parens.

lispy+lispyville works well for a similar functionality.

I use it on Doom Emacs, which configures everything for me.