Yeah, ocaml is awesome! Frankly, if it had a more familiar syntax but the same semantics, I think its popularity would have exploded in the last 15 years. It's silly, but syntax is the first thing people see, and it is only human to form judgments during those moments of first contact.
Syntax in programming languages are a question of style and personal preference. At the end of the day syntax is meant to help programmers communicate intent to the compiler. More minimalist syntax trades off less typing and reading for less redundancy and specificity. More verbose and even redundant syntax is in my opinion better for languages, because it gives the compiler and humans "flag posts" marking the intent of what was written. For humans, that can be a problem because when there are two things that need to be written for a specific behavior, they will tend to forget the other, but for compilers that's great because it gives them a lot of contextual information for recovery and more properly explaining to the user what the problem was. Rust could have optional semicolons. If you go and remove random ones in a file the compiler will tell you exactly where to put them back. 90% of the time, when it isn't ambiguous. But in an expression oriented language you need a delimiter.
It isn't necessarily my preference either, but it's the most familiar style of syntax broadly, and that matters more for adoption than my personal preferences do.
