Raven is meant to feel fresh yet familiar. Someone with coding experience should be able to hop on and get going quickly. With time they might find it easier and more fun than other languages, but they’re not bending their mind around a bunch of new concepts to get there.
Syntax is a crucial part of that second goal – familiarity – because it makes the first impression on users.[1] Luckily this is one area where languages have really converged, so there’s neither much scope nor need to innovate. It might be surprising to say that modern languages basically all look the same, but that’s only because core concepts (like lexical scope, control flow and block structure) are so universal that we take them for granted, and relatively superficial details (like the tokens used to delimit those blocks) stick out. Try an older, weirder language like Cobol, Forth or Malbolge and you’ll see what I mean.
All that said, Raven makes some tweaks to the formula that I think are interesting. Take a simple program which outputs pow(2, 3) = 8: