Or more realistically, your experience is on small projects, with only you coding so it is worthless, try opening a large C codebase and fixing all its flaws: good luck. Ada and its better strict typing is a pain for small projects which is why students don't like it but it really shines on large project (no, it doesn't fix all the issue but it helps). IMHO what should be done is to take Ada's semantic/strictness and wrap it around a less verbose syntax (1) because if the beginners hate the syntax then the language, no matter how good it is will NEVER take off (and even if it starts taking off it will fall down quickly: see Lisp).

1: yes, I know this was done on purpose but the lack of adoption of Ada EVEN AFTER there was free compilers available show that (IMHO) it was a mistake.