For me it was less about the verbosity and more about the overuse of patterns and general overengineering present in many (most?) Java APIs. Java doesn't strike me as being much more verbose than Go, but the differences in the API designs make a huge difference in how it feels to work with the language.
Go can be terse if everything is a interface{} and you ignore errors. But production quality Go is huge because there are so many things the compiler won't help with. I want a language that would generate the same boilerplate Go other people spend actual time on writing and reading.
