Without concrete examples it's hard to address your "rants" ) Please copy/paste some code here so we could discuss, I myself find Raku flexible rather than diff

Without concrete examples it's hard to address your "rants" ) Please copy/paste some code here so we could discuss, I myself find Raku flexible rather than difficult, though it could be difficult if one really wants it to be so, however I'd say 99% of my code shares the simplicity and clarity as any other code written, say on Python or Golang. Simplicity by itself is not a virtue of programming for me, it's simplicity WITH expressiveness what matters, for that matter Golang is extremely simple (in a sense of core language) and also extremely verbose, as it lacks some primitives that some languages have, so a programmer should reimplement the same ideas over and over again using limited language syntax (and writing a lot of boilerplate code) rather than relying on expressive syntax of a language core as this would be with Raku ... HTH