You can just stick to a subset of Julia if you prefer: use mutable structs, don’t declare type parameters, use Arrays of Any, and write loops. It is not recommended, but possible.
That said, I am very surprised to hear someone complaining about broadcasting as a user-level feature (I am not talking about hooking into the broadcasting implementation).
I consider it the most user-friendly part of the language: you get an amazing extension for free with a single character unified syntax. I don’t think things could get nicer than this.
Why would people choose Julia over Matlab/R/Python, if not for speed and elegance?
Creating yet another language that does not improve on existing ones would be pretty pointless.
This suggestion comes up very often from people misunderstanding the performance model of Julia. You can’t just “use it as an engine” and gain any of the benefits.
I think you are just overwhelmed with learning a new language that is different from the ones you used previously. Instead of recommending a fork or a redesign (which, TBH, is unlikely to gain traction anyway), I would suggest you just give it some time and things will fall into place.