I know your feeling, I've programming in Clojure for one year now (although I don't have time to program with it full time). I think your kind of problems are more related on "how" you use Clojure rather than Clojure itself. Errors are obscure only if you try to do too much things in one function. Try to keep functions as simple as possible and to do one task per function, no more. Then message errors are not that hard to figure out, although yes, I agree that for example in Java errors are easier to figure out (but definitely not fixing them...). And anyway using the REPL you can test one function at a time, given it's a pure function, which is also a new state of mind: eliminate all possible mutable state.

I've found that when using Clojure you have to think in a different way about the problems to be able to "see" how your problem can be resolved in Clojure in a more elegant and concise way. This is hardest task I've found when moving to Clojure from Java: change your mind. With the right mindset, everything (in my case at least) seems like pretty trivial in Clojure, and definitely much faster to code and test than Java.