You are overreacting. I'm not saying it's shitty - but it SEEMS to be at least for most Java/C# devs (I know) AT FIRST SIGHT.
My hypothesis was: Objective-C is "not nice" (sorry, I'm not familiar with HN political correctness) therefore Swift feels like a true relief for iOS devs and thus this much traction.
It seems these days there are a lot of Java and C# focused people who are unfamiliar with what came earlier. They have a hard time making these sorts of comparisons.
To me the comparison that makes more sense is going from C to objc. Or alternatively, comparing objc and C++ (especially C++ as practiced in the 1990s, not the RAII or template patterns that emerged later).
Say you're looking at the landscape as it existed a while back, and you've decided to make language changes to C in order to add objects. On the one hand you have C++ as it existed then: a language that can't seem to figure itself out, that has a very complex syntax and lots of troubling situations you can walk into.
Then along comes objc. In contrast to C++, the language delta from C is tiny and easy to keep in your head. Especially before Apple started doing all this compiler-fu of recent years, it felt like just a few keywords bolted on, and most of the important additions seemed to be in the runtime library.
When I first saw objc it kind of clicked for me as the anti-C++, in a way that is truer to C and doesn't add a lot of complexity. At the time that seemed refreshing, though I think I see more good in C++ now that RAII and templates are more of a thing. (If only there existed a set of 2 people who could agree on what C++ features to use.)
Objective-C is a great language; at least a lot of us who have been developing in it for years think so. We're excited about Swift because although ObjC has modernized a great deal, there are limitations to how far it can be pushed. Swift's clean block syntax is a good example here. Objective-C, if you're not turned off by the syntax, can be a joy to program in.
It doesn't even have namespaces. ARC basically made "struct" obsolete (goodbye easy literal data instatiatons), and it doesn't have a lot of the things programmers have come to expect even in compiled languages these days. Now don't get me wrong, for a 30 year old language, it's pretty good, but calling it great may be a little over stated.
I don't mind the syntax, but I don't think it's the nicest language out there feature wise.
My hypothesis was: Objective-C is "not nice" (sorry, I'm not familiar with HN political correctness) therefore Swift feels like a true relief for iOS devs and thus this much traction.