On the other hand, dependency management in go in any sane way is such a byzantine task that it takes ages to get working, and even then it still doesn't.

Given an empty set of environment variables, setting up a new go project with dependencies and all in a way that people cloning it later on can also use the dependencies in a single command, without vendoring dependencies, without building custom scripts, is impossible.

It's impossible with first party tools, but I've had a great experience with Glide.

That said, go drives me up a wall. Using interface{} to muck with JSON and typecast every step of the way is just my nightmare. It's inelegant in every way

Type cast every step of the way? Methinks you are either doing something wrong or dealing with unstructured json.

The pain of dealing with unstructured json/mapping types is exactly what I'm referring to. :)

That said, I don't think the language as a whole lends itself towards elegance - that's pretty much the opposite of their goals. I don't agree that their model for simplicity is the only (or best) model for simplicity is all.

I concur with the sentiment.

The risk is still there for dependencies, but it helps that the community for the most part follows "a little copying is better than a little dependency" as an adage.