Common Lisp user here. I was also disappointed in the same way when trying Clojure.
Other minor things i didn't like was the noisy [] on the syntax, and the fact that for practical purposes you're fully tied to the JVM and the java runtime libs.
That's more like a positive thing about Clojure. Java inter-op and targeting the JVM gives Clojure a great chance of adoption at large enterprises.
These days no one really has a issue installing jars on a production machine.
My general experience of cider is that for a certain set of tasks it is much better than slime. But, the problem is, most of my day-to-day coding tasks are hampered by the language: e.g. if I have a web server running and I want to change a request handler, you can’t just recompile the handler, you also have to restart the server.
If you call the function by name yourself, like (foo arg), and you recompile foo, any code that called foo will see the new version.
I agree that Clojure has a lot of strong points and that s-expressions probably put a lot of people off, but as a Lisp programmer, I was very disappointed in Clojure's debugging/interactive development story (and I've heard that from a lot of others). It feels more like using a typical scripting language compared to the traditional Lisp/Smalltalk experience, and even there, a typical scripting language would at least give useful backtraces. As it stands, I think a decent number of conventional Lisp programmers would also worry about large Clojure programs being unmaintainable unless they're superbly written.