> was exposed to functional programming my first year at university (it was used in the introductory courses) and quickly noticed that contrary to the hype (similar to yours), functional programs tended to be more bloated with trying to work around limitations of the less expressive programming model/language and not particularly more robust.

In other words, when you first tried a functional programming language you tried to write imperative code in it, and the result ended up bloated and fragile? I'm not surprised.

Guess what, trying to write pure FP in Java by chaining together static methods and "Function<A, B>" objects would end up with bloated and fragile code too; but that's not a valid criticism of OO.