I started using Clojure just after 1.3 came out so I could be wrong, but my impression was that while contrib was all in one place, it was still maintained by a bunch of random people who got their code into contrib, rather than being treated as a core part of the language the way (I believe) Golang's is.
Yes it was, like I said it is better now. However it was also kind of nice because everything was just there. Even with good mantainers, some of the same problems could keep existing.
