Early DEV Thoughts on Objective-C

I've been a developer for over 15 years.  I started out with primarily C and C++ on UNIX during my undergrad years and during my first couple of years in the industry.  

I shifted to Borland C++ and eventually Microsoft Visual C++ during the early MFC days (ouch) and then went on the usual migration path of Visual Basic 6.0 -- Visual Basic .NET -- C#.NET development.   I've also done a good amount of scripting from REXX to VBscript to Javascript.

BUT I have to admit - developing using Objective-C is a pretty painful experience.  Even though my engineering side appreciates the flexibility and the seemingly robust combination of MVC UI infrastructure integrated with dynamic progamming elements (runtime methods, etc) topped off with asynchronous messaging facilities and the like... I'm slightly disappointed at the difficulty of the "development experience".  For all the flexibility - not enough is done in the language (and the development environment) to ease or "control" the experience for the developer and let's not even talk about memory management.  You're pretty much thrust into the soup... not sure about how effective this is when you're trying to expand your developer base.

I know with time I'll appreciate the flexibility of the language once I'm comfortably ramped up the learning curve - but this language is pretty painful - or maybe I'm just being a little punk.  Sorry for the vent.