I don't even care about the verbosity - it's just ugly syntax. If I'm skimming a file that uses that syntax, I could easily get confused and think there's a comparison going on. One of Ruby's big draws (to me, at least) is code that is incredibly expressive and code that is aesthetically pleasing to look at. I feel this is serving the expressiveness at huge cost to aesthetics, and honestly there's not much gain to expressiveness in my opinion.

EDIT: I also completely forgot about the existing hashrocket syntax for maps.