When first getting started with clojure and repl-driven development in emacs, there are many hang-ups.
It's slow, the keybindings to get there are as weird as emacs's, errors/feedback show up in a handful of places, the repl buffer is small and takes up screen real-estate...
Just about all of these have a solution, if you're looking for that beautiful repl-bliss.
One solution came when I started using treemacs.