I recommend using https://github.com/Prismatic/om-tools, if only for the defcomponent macro: https://github.com/Prismatic/om-tools#defcomponent

This abstracts out all the reify stuff and makes for far cleaner component definitions.

reify is usually a low-level construct in Clojure. A lot of libraries use it under the hood, I wouldn't be surprised if you use a few of them :)

Probably, but it still left me feeling a little alienated.

Not to take anything from Om tho, people using it seem to enjoy it a lot! I guess I'm just less smart ;-)

I wouldn't say less smart, it took me some time to get used to reify before feeling comfortable using it too. Think anonymous classes in Java for example, its almost the same thing.