It's really sad that learning a new language is considered "a big obstacle." An average programmer should be able to pick up nearly any new computing language quite easily.
The language itself is actually very simple and writing plugins for lighttable is the opposite of complex, there are amazing tutorials floating around the web. The whole process is simply just manipulating sets of data, it's all about adding and removing triggers.
This said, you can also write lighttable plugins in javascript.
