Thanks. After some more effort I found out much of my frustration was due some bugs and some bad config settings.

Lisp-paredit is buggy for me (must use a shortcut twice to get one motion, can't hold down modifier keys when changing direction e.g. from slurp to barf). Very troublesome. Also lisp-paredit strict mode fights with parinfer, so you must turn it off to get the expected parinfer paren closing behaviors. I'll give parinfer some more time to sink in now that I have it working better.

Adding some familiar paredit keybindings (to keymap.cson) helps a lot too:

    'atom-text-editor[data-grammar~="clojure"]':
      'ctrl-right': 'lisp-paredit:slurp-forwards'
      'ctrl-left': 'lisp-paredit:barf-forwards'
      'ctrl-alt-right': 'lisp-paredit:barf-backwards'
      'ctrl-alt-left': 'lisp-paredit:slurp-backwards'