> I do actually think about this sort of thing quite a bit

Forgive me for being abrasive above.

> I’m firmly of the belief that C style type syntax is never going to not be confusing

Yeah, C is going to stay C. No fixing that. The bummer is when new languages repeat the problem because they don't understand what causes it.

> Personally I think a core problem is that declaration and use are different

I claim that declaration and use can be the same. In all cases, you read the affixes for arrays, pointers, function calls, and struct/union fields from left to right.

    // declarations
    int i
    int a[10]
    int f(int arg)[10] { ... }
    int p@    

    // usage
    print i
    print a[1]
    print f(1)[1]
    print p@

You could change the declarations to use a "let" keyword, but I don't think it'll make them more readable while maintaining the goal of "declaration follows usage".

> I’m not sure how I would declare the type of a function that returns a pointer to an array

    // function, pointer, array
    int f()@[10] ...