There's a missing dimension: orthogonality. Having terse notation that implements a feature that you can reason about in isolation is fine for both beginners and experts. But features that have complex interactions with their environment are hard to reason about regardless of the syntax (though bad syntactic choices can certainly make it worse).

You can introduce a notation that's terse without problem, so long as it's comprehensible when encoutered. Example: the (!·!) operator (which I just made up), which can be placed around any expression to log the value of the expression to STDOUT. Its value is the same as the expression (so `(!3+7!)` equals `10`).