Clojure is one of the most addictive languages I've ever worked in. I can see why so many people pick it up as something to build hobby projects with, it's just so damn fun to write.
Ideally, you wouldn't be restarting the process all that often. I'll typically be REPL'd in for quite a few hours at a time as I'm developing (only reason for restarts is usually pulling in new dependencies, or if your state gets out of whack; which is something that doesn't happen all that often after adopting Stuart's "reloaded" workflow based on component)
I can't speak for other people, but I guess being a person and considering switching from Clojure because the development workflow has a long feedback cycle that the answer to your question is a yes?
I have Ring reloading code for me as it changes, however if there is a syntax error or exception in a thread, code doesn't get reloaded and strangeness ensues, requiring me to kill the jvm instance and start it up again. Stuart Sierra talks about this problem in his reloaded workflow, and how it's still a problem for him, but he at least now has a faster way of refreshing his app instances.
The REPL takes a bit to start, and then I leave it running for days. The startup time really has nothing to do with the development experience once you're in the system. Even very large projects compile in less than a second for me.
