[com]

I’d disagree, on the pretty front.

As I’ve learned it, I found it very charming and often surprisingly sweet - as an example idiomatic terms for urination and defecation are very funny: plassen (making a large pond) and klaaivormen (forming clay) - add to that a rather easy to rhyme language with a tendency towards charming and heartfelt emotional range, and the end result is quite nice.

Add lots of domestic and Caribbean regional variation in the home countries, close sister languages: Vlaams (certainly in its higher form a very different register of the language than the Hollands standard form), Afrikaans and West-Frisk, Papiamento etc and you’ve got a very cosy (gezellig!) and dynamic inter-language community!

The aggressive simplification of standard Dutch initially offended my tastes, but later I’ve found that particular discipline improved my English by accident and I’m now a fan of the sparse elegance and surprising nuance of that style …

[wdb]

I think you mean 'kleien' instead of 'klaaivormen'?

[com]

I’ve heard “kleivormen” in Hoorn, “klei maken” (a little more gross - no surprise given their famous export, disease swearing, I suppose) in Den Haag, and “kleien” below the great rivers.

Edit: spelling, never ran into the NL word for clay in writing as an adult language learner not into geophysics, civil engineering or pottery