The biggest for me is needing to understand the .NET ecosystem without knowing C#. Then there's the lack of beginner information. I own several F# books and none of them assume you're coming from a scripting language background. I eventually gave up for good. OCaml doesn't have the .NET problem, but I found it to be unergonomic in a lot of ways.

Make no mistake, it's a cool language that I'd love to be good at. The code always looks elegant, I'm just terrible at writing it.

This was my issue when trying to learn clojure as well

Same. F#, Clojure, Scala, & Kotlin have all been the same for me. Python's VM is written in C, but I have no reason to know C. In Clojure they have you call out to Java libraries a ton. Someone always tells me that this isn't true on here, but it was my experience as well. Having to learn so many tools like emacs or CIDRE or Leinegen was also a turn off.

I really love Clojure, but I have a lot of experience on the JVM so I didn't have to climb multiple learning curves simultaneously.

While the clojure ecosystem has a lot of wonderful, bright and helpful people in it, and clojure itself is technically impressive (esp. its collections implementation), the new user experience isn't great.

I'm not an experienced emacs user, so that makes it doubly difficult, as the ironed-out workflows seem to assume that you are (which is fair, as emacs and lisp are like peanut butter and jelly). However, these days it's fair to assume that a new clojure user is probably learning 'clojure', 'lispy ways', 'java/jvm', and 'emacs' simultaneously.

I think that calva/vscode has a lot of potential to drop emacs off that list, which is welcome, as its learning curve alone is legendary. If you look at that list, it should not be surprising that the community is small. There's so much to learn that I it seems too much to even start.

There are multiple options to approach the Clojure* ecosystem. But yes, it is more focused towards dedicated and experienced developers overall. I use IntelliJ Idea + Cursive for development and that seems quite comfortable. I have a very rough sketch of the environment setup for a real app here: https://www.orgpad.com/s/hfxYQYkcLYV We use a similar setup to develop OrgPad itself.

You can use Babashka https://github.com/babashka/babashka for a quick and dirty setup to get you up and running quickly. That is also useful for scripting some things. You might also try shadow-cljs + ClojureScript, if you are more at home in the Node.js/ Browser JavaScript ecosystem and want to do something with it. There is a new "(Not)Babashka" but built on ClojureScript: https://github.com/borkdude/nbb that might be interesting as well.

I have found this video by James Trunk: https://youtu.be/C-kF25fWTO8?t=848 to have a very nice live coding example.

Borkdude is a total boss; babashka and clj-kondo are amazing.

Also, don't get me wrong, I reiterate that I already love clojure, I just wish there were fewer and lower barriers for others to join in.

I realize there are already people on that case like https://practical.li/, and are doing an excellent job. I also think that things like https://github.com/Olical/conjure are pretty awesome, being predominantly a vimmer.