I never understood why Erlang syntax has been so commonly maligned. I had no trouble getting through Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang in less than a week, and the syntax never required any conscious moment to "click," it just flowed right past. The only exception at first was the operator precedence rules inherited from Prolog, but those are memorized quickly. I also didn't have in-depth prior experiences to non-AL…
It took me about four months of hard studying for erlang to click. I think it was due to learning some CS fundamentals (e.g. had never heard of a tuple before, never seen multiple dispatch), learning functional programming fundamentals (had never used a purely functional language before - unless you count bash), and had never looked at prolog. Finally, I was simultaneously exposed to new concepts of concurrency, pattern matching, etc.
I think what happened was that the unusual syntax is the easiest thing to blame for the resulting confusion, because it's the surface layer you engage with.