So e12e is making an argument for XML-y over Lispy. However, choosing good words is really, really hard. If you pick a different word for each construct, there's a needless mental burden; if you pick a uniform strategy ("end-<kwd>") you potentially get less readable code. And either way it's far more verbose, as you point out.

Some of our target audiences are middle- and high-school students, some of whom have weak typing skills (we know from numerous workshops we run). Increasing even the raw number of characters is a real problem for them.

My preference is to use ; for one-liners, but end where you have a multi-clause entity and you want to be able to clearly tell where it ends. If we find that there is general agreement on this, we can make it a context-sensitive check, à la indentation. Then, a program generated by a tool can do something consistent and ignore all these checks, whereas human-facing environments would enforce them (by checking or correcting).

As for your examples, to my Pyretical eye, the third of your examples (with the dangling ";") looks just wrong. However, your fourth example is syntactically incorrect.