There is some redundancy between vectors and lists, admittedly. However, edn is not without legacy. Part of that legacy is Lisp and s-expressions, and deserves

There is some redundancy between vectors and lists, admittedly. However, edn is not without legacy. Part of that legacy is Lisp and s-expressions, and deserves some respect and accommodation. If that means readers map the [] and () to the same code path, well, that's not much work. Writers can always write only [] if they prefer. Having the distinction has proven tremendously useful to Clojure, and might to other applications as well. In particular, consider DSLs written in edn, which, like Clojure, might need to distinguish calls or grouping from list/vector data. For all the bitching that goes on about parens, few people would want to work in a language without them :)