I generally agree, but: verbosity is mostly due to Cocoa naming conventions, not Objective-C. PyObjC (Cocoa bridge for Python) is — aside from few classes mapped to Python types — equally verbose and even more annoying to use, because you can't mix method name with arguments.

Reference-counted memory management might be step back, but I don't agree about inconsistent object lifetimes. Cocoa has simple rules: you're responsible for releasing objects returned by methods with `init`, `new` or `copy` in name. delegates are not retained. Everything else is retained and autoreleased for you. It's pretty consistent and even clang's static analyzer can catch common mistakes.