I don't agree that Clojure suffers heavily from the Lisp curse. The prevailing paradigm in Clojure code is the almost exclusive use of the built-in data literal

I don't agree that Clojure suffers heavily from the Lisp curse. The prevailing paradigm in Clojure code is the almost exclusive use of the built-in data literals as function input/output (as opposed to using custom datatypes). For this reason, we don't really use frameworks as Clojure libraries are usually quite simple to glue together. The main reasons why it is still fairly niche I would say are - having to learn a new editor paradigm, e.g. paredit and/or parinfer - functional programming - people who think Java/JVM tech is icky - an overall lack of promotion by Cognitect Furthermore, you will need to both like the properties of Lisp as well as the the restrictions of functional programming on top of coexisting with Java on the JVM. This is a fantastic proposition to my ears, but it sounds horrible to some other people.