Why do you dislike racket?

I don't remember everything on top of my head unfortunately, but it was things like, weird choices all around like long names, no real OS threads, that kind of stuff. Sorry, I don't remember, I just know I tried it a couple of times and disliked it.

I have to agree on you regarding OS threads, although there are places, but they're processes. For long names, most names have an abbreviation like call-with-current-continuation has call/cc, and in any case, you can make your own abbreviation using make-rename-transformer so this shouldn't be an issue

Why would one bother when clojure has core.async, short names and everything else?

The tooling is complicated with Clojure. If you are teaching an introductory class, having a single simple install of DrRacket is a big plus.

Good point. Though I'm not so sure it's such a big deal in comparison of using a language that's not entertaining.

Because racket has hygienic macros and #lang, and syntax-parse.