It's a matter of scope. You can build a secure currency exchange protocol: I have yet to hear of a technical issue with BTC that threatens its raison d'être. But when you're making a distributed, general purpose, scriptable contracting platform at some point you ought to consider trimming the core way down.

Maybe if the contracts had more constrained semantics ETH programming would be less scary, at the cost of some bells and whistles or more verbose syntax.