Make the package management more Cargo-like and I'd probably adopt it wholesale; whenever I've tried Julia in the past the user experience of just getting started has been the off-putting part.
Julia's package management was inspired by Cargo, afaik. What did you find off-putting about it, what would make it more Cargo-like? I've heard from people who are not used to the REPL wanting to do things from the shell directly, if that's the problem, there's the jlpkg tool [1].