Red seems like a very ambitious project to be completed by a single developer. I've only briefly looked at the syntax, but it seemed to me that it's not very clear. The excess use of brackets is visually confusing.
The syntax is minimalist for a reason. The primary paradigm of languages in the Rebol family (like Red) is language-oriented programming of which creating domain specific languages in an important factor. The more minimalist the base syntax the less you force the end-user into a syntactic corner, when they go to design their own DSL's. As for blocks (those things delimited by brackets) they're technically a data-structure (actually all code is an implicit data structure). In Rebol for example all the typical control flow structures are actually functions which take as arguments vectors of code.
Too many brackets is rarely the initial complaint. Usually people complain about the lack of parens in function calls. Free-ranging evaluation is an important design element, but it can take some getting used to. One of those "With great power..." things.
Its an Open Source project and, while it could use more developers I'm sure (most OSS projects could), it is definitely not only being worked on by one developer.
Once you start writing in it you realize how much the syntax often reads like an English sentence. And the brackets make perfect sense when you begin to understand blocks. And besides; its no more than curly braces in C and definitely fewer than parentheses in Lisp.
Parenthesis in Lisp are not more than those in C. It's just that there is only one type of parenthesis and the accepted convention is to pile all the closing ones at the last line. When you have some time play with them in both C and Lisp and count them.