[yogthos]

I've had the opposite experience myself. At my last job we switched from Java to Clojure and found that similar types of projects were much faster to develop and easier to maintain. My team also hired a lot of coop students and junior devs that we trained up.

I find the mistake people often make is to get clever with Clojure. Using macros when regular functions would do is a good example of that. It is absolutely possible to write impenetrable Clojure if you start doing weird things just because you can.

However, I find the beauty of Clojure is precisely in the fact that you can write simple and direct code that solves the problem in a clean way without the need to get clever.

My biggest advice for structuring maintainable Clojure projects is to keep things simple, and to break things up into small components that can be reasoned about independently.