I've tried several times to figure out Inform 7, and I always go back to the old C-ish Inform 6 instead. I think my brain is damaged by prolonged exposure to traditional programming languages.
I had the exact same experience. I really wanted to like Inform 7 (and plenty of people do) but it feels completely counter-intuitive because it wants to feel like natural language but it's still "just" a programming language.
It still has a fairly rigid syntax - it's just more verbose than a regular programming language. That is probably an oversimplification, but that's how it felt to me at least.