Just because once you've learned an unintuitive, quirky, magic trick in a language that becomes useful doesn't mean it was worth being added. Many of your counterpoints seem to be "you don't like foo? I find foo useful." miss the main argument: nobody ever said bizarre things like "@" aren't useful in cases where you need them. The criticism is that things like this were just thrown into a giant pile with no regard to consistency, expectations, elegance, etc.