"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

> It's just so... dogmatic. Inexpressive. It ultimately feels to me like a barrier between intention and reality, another abstraction.

On the contrary, it's a much more effective way to express intention when you have a language that can implement it. Programmers in C-family languages waste most of their time working around the absence of sum types, they just don't realise that that's what they're doing. Yes it is an abstraction, all programming is abstraction.