Yeah, having done this, it's extremely verbose if you have all your error handling in there due to the verbosity of dealing with JSON and explicit return values instead of exceptions. By far my greatest annoyance is that []interface{} cannot be directly cast to []concreteType. Having to make a sized slice and type assert each value is annoying. Require validation of the values for even more "if err != nil" fun.
Many Go advocates seem to consider the verbosity a feature, because it's explicit and forbids any clever-but-confusing tricks.