I think you oversaw that core.logic is basically a minikanren (plus c-kanren, plus alpha-kanren) implementation in clojure instead of scheme; it even points to the papers and to The Reasoned Schemer for documentation and reference.
That is, saying that minikanren seems to be closer to the mark than core.logic is a little bit nonsensical (please read that in a good sense!)
You're right, although I think what I was actually wrong about was what minikanren is (probably by looking at examples in languages I was less familiar with).
I don't want to do logic programming in clojure (or whatever other language), I want to do logic programming in Prolog and drop it into my clojure project and have to do as little plumbing as possible.
The nearest analogy I can come up with is LINQ. In the examples in [1] the experience of the developer is closer to writing SQL in the middle of a C# or VB file, rather than having a good C# database query library.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-g...
Minikanren seems to be closer to the mark, and I thank the commenters who pointed it out!