Despite completely disagreeing with you on the first point, I've had some of the same experience too.

Some years ago when I was going through languages frequently, I was pretty interested in it for a bit, but found it kind of hard to get into and my interest ultimately wandered.

I thought a large part of that was due to my unusually strong dislike of the syntax, and that that was why I found it unusually difficult to grok. Maybe it wasn't. Interesting.