How is significant whitespace a design flaw? Have you ever seen a professionally written program in any language where care in formatting did not extend to having whitespace under control? Gofmt comes to mind. Taking this reality that everyone cares about white space and making it a first class citizen is more of a stroke of genius than a design flaw IMHO.
On the other hand, taking the reality that everyone cares about white space, it makes enforcement of whitespace irrelevant while it makes copying and pasting and auto formatting code very very annoying or even impossible in some cases.
It makes things that are trivial in other languages like copying and pasting chunks of code around or auto formatting code as you type into a very hard problem just to save some delimiters. It looks nice in code samples but sucks in real production codebases.
