In my experience batteries are almost never fully charged and it's hard to get feedback if you only release a perfect cathedral. With no feedback, it's kind of unlikely you will build something popular.
To take a topical example, even after 30 years of tuning, the core language `dict` in Python still seems to have no easy way to "pre-size" an instance. There is no power of 2, no `rightSize`, nuthin'. So, one of your rough edges literally cannot arise due to an inflexibility/API design flaw (IMO). Yes, there must be 3rd party replacements or ways to pre-size in some slow subclass or whatever, but you could also just write a `proc initTab` that always calls `rightSize` for your own code. What's at issue here is "out of the box" (and personally I think the Nim workaround is less onerous than workarounds in the Python world). Do you have to learn your way around? Sure. A sales pitch of "just like Python but compiled/with native types" is definitely not quite right. That's Cython/similar. Analogies and oversimplifications help some people while others want the real story, and you strike me as the latter. Nim gives programmers more power and flexibility, but responsibilities also come with that. Cue Spider Man's Uncle Ben. ;-) It is yet a comparatively tiny community. Bugs, workarounds, and rough edges come with that. Unused patterns like your `&` are just unused, unoptimized things waiting to be discovered/fixed. There was a time when `C` had no proper namespacing of struct members and that is why some core Unix types have prefixes like the `st_*` in `struct stat` (run "man 2 stat" on any unix machine). No one using Nim _wants_ it to be hard, but there may also be good reasons some things are the way they are (often flexibility, performance, or safety, but yes sometimes neglect). I'm really sorry to hear your entry has been tough, but the flip side of that is you could probably make a HUGE impact to future similar-but-not-quite-you's, and I again encourage you to try! Even just documenting everything somewhere would probably help at least a few other Python Refugees. :-) Cheers and best wishes whatever you decide.
