For what it's worth, I think OCaml's syntax is one of its weakest points (not to mention syntax extensions...) and I have been writing OCaml 3 years longer than I've been writing Standard ML.
Well yes I agree if you compare OCaml to Standard ML its syntax is not as good and I do prefer Standard ML over it. However I prefer OCaml over Java, Javascript, Scala (and the bazillion other brace block languages that are the same), and yes even Haskell.