I too had this opinion of it from starting to read a (now out-of-date) book on Swift and Cocoa. It seemed some of the decisions eg. no fall-through for switch statements were done to reduce the possibility of bugs but just made it more irritating. I don't know if the language has changed in this regard though.

I always thought C# was the meeting place between Visual Basic and C++, where it was familiar enough to both language users to migrate, although occasionally different enough to cause problems (eg. generics vs templates). I don't know what Swift is "related to" in this regard - any ideas?

Of course, my lack of knowledge about Swift may show me up here so I am happy to be corrected and educated. This was merely an observation.

The Swift discussion in the article is very good and logically laid out.