Well yes, I was one of the haters back then because it was too verbose (for me). IMHO Go is less verbose than early Java.

It could be less verbose without loosing readability. My two top picks would be to add a ternary expression and a real while loop so that you could write better iterators.

while next := some.Next(); next != nil { // ... }

Such a while loop would be consistent with the if statement support for an assignment and following check.