Yeah, in thinking about my example a little more and generalizing, I think one of the problems that people have with reading clojure is that it doesn't have as robust a syntactic indication of scope that other languages have.
Don't you mean clojure has a MORE robust indication of scope than other languages? In clojure you can nest lets, and it is very obvious when the binding is out of scope, but in c-style languages, once bound, they stay bound till the end of the function.