I think most of your issues really come down to not embracing or understanding a proper clojure(script) workflow and/or not really understanding the tooling tha

I think most of your issues really come down to not embracing or understanding a proper clojure(script) workflow and/or not really understanding the tooling that currently exists. I double checked the date of this article to make sure this wasn't written 6 months ago and posted now. You should check out the clojurians slack channel, there you can probably get good answers for 85% of the things that are holding you back. Good luck with it, using clojure/script + cursive clojure + intellij has been the best development experience I've had in 18 years of professional coding! It's 110% worth the investment.