Sure, but that was intentional: the assumption was that you had already learned C. Objective-C is a great language if you know C and you want a SmallTalk-style message dispatch runtime.
It was better before ObjC 2.0; dot syntax makes it hard to tell out of context what a line of code is doing, which was never a problem with the original language.
It was also better before UIKit; The killer app is Interface Builder, which is unbelievably painful to use with UIKit compared to how it used to be with pre-CoreAnimation, pre-autolayout AppKit.
It was better before ObjC 2.0; dot syntax makes it hard to tell out of context what a line of code is doing, which was never a problem with the original language.
It was also better before UIKit; The killer app is Interface Builder, which is unbelievably painful to use with UIKit compared to how it used to be with pre-CoreAnimation, pre-autolayout AppKit.